ROAD TRIP USA 2011: PORK CHOP JOHN'S TO MOUNT RUSHMORE

A crack of dawn alarm the next morning, gave us the chance to catch a cracking view of the sun rising over the fields of Idaho.

I had persuaded Neal to make such an early start as one of the few food destinations I had marked out in these “flyover states” Pork Chop John's announced on its website that it closed at 3pm. As it turned out, it didn’t, but we were not aware of this as we set off from Cottonwood a little after 6.30am and pointed our rental car towards our next stopover at Butte, Montana.

Butte is a city whose fortunes rose and fell along with the fortunes of copper mining and, as we pulled into the parking lot of our lunchtime destination, the deserted downtown spoke to the fact that it is probably now on the lower end of the curve. Interestingly enough, one of the local food staples is a Cornish style pasty, brought over in the late 1800’s by Cornish miners looking for work after the decline of the tin mining industry back in the UK.

We were not there for this taste of home, however. John Burklund first started to serve his famous sandwiches in 1924 from a street cart before opening his first shop a few years later. They became an instant hit and are obviously still just as popular. As we walked up to the entrance, a long line of kids from the local high school was forming at the take out window and more of their classmates were already occupying all of the stools at the counter inside the small restaurant area.

We forced our way through the gaggle of squealing youngsters and waited until they began to drift back to their classroom about twenty minutes later, before squeezing ourselves into two available seats and placing our order. The menu is small and we had overheard most of the throng ordering “Double Loaded” so, without knowing what it was, we did the same. What arrived was a gargantuan sandwich prominently featuring two pounded pork sirloins that had been battered and deep fried, served in a hamburger bun with onions, pickles and cheese.

It was hot and freshly prepared. It was also pretty delicious and made the ridiculously early start worthwhile. As we ate, we chatted with the Eddie, the current owner, who had started making the sandwiches as a small child when his grandfather and then father were in charge of the business. As chains continue to proliferate, it is really rather special to enjoy a local “delicacy” at a place that has been doing what it does for the best part of a century. Long may they prosper.

There is not much else to report about Butte, Montana. We spent the rest of the day wandering around the slightly bleak downtown area and, after an unmemorable supper at a local bar, we retired to our hotel to prepare for another early start the next morning.

On Neal’s list of things to see & do in between meals driving through Yellowstone Park and, of course, stopping off to see one of the most famous natural wonders in the United States, Old Faithful. The famous old geyser received its name in the late 1800’s and was often used by travellers as a laundry. Apparently, they would stuff their clothes down the hole and wait until it erupted, during which time, the stench from their clothes would be removed by the heat and sulphur.

We were, unsurprisingly, not the only ones to have the idea of watching one of the country’s most famous landmarks do its thing. We took our seat on some small hard benches surrounding the geyser, along with lots and lots of other people from around the globe, like us, holding cameras and video recorders in quivering anticipation. Then we waited and waited and waited some more. The Sun had risen high in the sky by now and I was beginning to regret that I had chosen to wear a sweatshirt as rivulets of sweat began to stream down my bonce and my back. Thankfully after an hour, Old Faithful did what it has been doing for thousands of years, for all of three minutes and we could leave. I could easily have lived without the experience, but Neal seemed pretty pleased, so that’s all right then.

We spent the next few hours driving around the national park, getting out of the car every now and again to gaze into the sulphurous pools and allow Neal time to fall on his arse for my amusement. However, by late afternoon we were done and turned the car towards one of the main exits to the park and our overnight destination of Gardiner, Montana.

I had marked out a well recommended steak restaurant for our evening’s dining pleasure, so was particularly depressed to be told, by the owner of our smart little guesthouse, that it had actually been closed for some years. Seeing the crestfallen look on my face, he told us that the best steak in town was at the unlikely location of the Best Western Hotel on the edge of town. He warned us that “everything else on the menu is not very good, but the steaks are great”.

Despite my reservations, it turned out that he knew his stuff. The rest of the meal at the restaurant may have been a bit crappy, but the steaks were really very good indeed. Neal’s rib eye was good enough to keep him quiet for a blissful few moments, while my slab of medium rare prime rib was good enough to make me wonder why I don’t indulge in this most primal of cuts more often. It is, at its best a glorious thing, at least an inch thick, pink and juicy and perfect when served with a dollop of horseradish and a silly amount of mashed potatoes with which to soak up its natural juices. British steak restaurants take note.

Our next port of call was the infamous town of Deadwood, Montana, made notorious by the likes of Calamity Jane, Doc Holliday and Wild Bill Hickok and made famous more recently by the TV show of the same name. It’s actually a fairly ghastly little place filled with tourist casinos and bad bars and restaurants (one of which, Diamond Lil’s is owned by Kevin Costner) but it proved harmless enough for one night and did give us the chance to boast that we had downed a few shots of sippin’ whiskey in one of the wild west’s most famous locations.

We booked ended the night’s stay in Deadwood with four of the most interesting tourist sights of the whole trip. En route there, we stopped to pay our respects at the site of the Battle of Little Big Horn, where we were pleased to see that modern sensitivities had won out over traditional prejudices allowing a monument to be erected to the members of Native American tribes who had also fallen in the bloody skirmish. And, just before we arrived in Deadwood, we stopped for half an hour to walk around the base of the Devil’s Tower, a 900ft high rock formation that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who is a fan of the films of Richard Dreyfuss.

After we left Deadwood, suffering somewhat from the effects of the whiskey the night before, we visited two more monuments, this time across the border in South Dakota. One of them is already amongst the most famous in the United States, while the other will be once it is finished in a little matter of some 200 more years. The Crazy Horse Memorial is a testimony to the stubbornness of one man called Korczak Ziolkowski, who decided in 1948 to build a monument to the Native Americans that would over shadow Mount Rushmore which he had helped create.

With the help of Native American leaders, Crazy Horse was chosen as the subject and since then, the image of the legendary leader has begun to emerge from the rock little by little through the efforts of the Ziolkowski family and a handful of helpers. They accept no Federal money and see this as a gift for future generations that will be completed when it is completed. I may not be around to see the finished result, but what has been achieved so far is mighty impressive.

By comparison, Mount Rushmore itself is a little underwhelming. It is still an interesting diversion, but much smaller than you anticipate, particularly if you have seen Hitchcock's classic North by Northwest. It kept our attention for, oh all of twenty minutes before we looked at each other and said, “are we done then?” and headed back to our SUV.

Next stop North Dakota.

ROAD TRIP USA 2011: ONE NIGHT IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

I am going to warn you right at the beginning of this post that there is not going to be a lot of food discussion or many photographs of amazing meals to make you jealous and hungry in equal measure. The reason is, quite simply, that there was precious little good eating going of the next stage of the road trip, as we made our way from Portland, Oregon to Cottonwood, Idaho.

There was, however, lots of interesting stuff to see and I placed myself firmly in the hands of my travelling companion, Neal whose research had pinpointed plenty of potentially enticing stop offs on the long drive ahead.

First stop, after Portland, was at the lake side resort of Coeur D’Alene. We ate a meal in a brewpub that did not kill us and spent the night in a small motel that was situated at the unlikely location of Sunup and Sunshine. It didn’t kill us either. Before we arrived in Coeur D’Alene, however, we made a brief stop in Spokane, where we encountered one of our favourite people of the whole trip.

Marvin Carr had a long career as a switcher on the railroads. He saved his money and invested it in the stock market. He obviously did quite well and, at the age of seventy, he was able to cash in and fulfill his dream of opening a museum. He called it the “One Of A Kind In The World” Museum and began filling it with one of the oddest assortment of exhibits you are ever likely to come across. Fourteen years later and at the age of eighty four, he is still there every day giving tours to the occasional visitor who finds their way to this quirky little place houses in a small warehouse in industrial estate on the outskirts of the city.

After Coeur D’Alene, we made our way out of the state of Washington towards the vast expanses of Montana and Idaho. We were at an intersection between three states at this point which meant that we were able to dip out of Washington and make our first stop in the small and slightly decrepit town of Wallace.

There is no real reason to make a detour there, unless you are interested in seeing The Oasis Bordello Museum. The building was purchased in the early 1980’s by a man who found out afterwards that it was an abandoned brothel, with just about everything left as it had been just before the working girls fled from a police raid. He decided to keep it open as a museum and the insides are as dated and depressing as you might imagine.

Far more interesting was our next stop, The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana. We reached it after a very long drive, by the end of which time we were both becoming a little cranky. The sheer lunacy of this huge vast museum, however, pirked us up a great deal. Like Marvin Carr’s effort back in Spokane, this was the work of a single man, Gil Mangles. Along with his wife, Joanne, he has dedicated much of his life since 1981, and over five acres of land to celebrating everything American.

There are over thirty buildings filled with a genuinely astounding collection of treasures and junk. I cannot think of any other place that might proudly display an entire school building from the 1870’s next to the nosecone of a rocket, next to a collection of 100 chainsaws, next to a collection of 1960’s arcade games, next to a collection of antique motorcycles, next to….well you get the picture.

It really is an astonishing place and had the potential to fill the entire day. We were, however on a schedule and set off a couple of hours later slightly shell shocked, but in much better spirits than when we arrived.

We spent the night in the pleasing University town of Missoula, Montana. Again, there is little to report, but we grabbed a couple of pints and a decent night’s sleep before the next long drive of the journey. It was pouring with rain the next morning, but fortunately it cleared before we reached our first stop of the day, the deserted ghost town of Garnet, Montana. In its heyday, it had a population of well over a thousand people consisting predominantly of miners and their families. By the 1920’s however, it was on the decline and by the 1930’s it was all but deserted. It made a fascinating stop, particularly as many of the buildings still contained the remnants of the former occupant’s belongings.

We did stop for lunch. Just in case anyone was wondering if there was going to be any food in this post at all. The drive from Garnet to Cottonwood, Idaho, was over four hours long, through some of the most astonishingly beautiful scenery of the entire trip.

Highway 12 is banked on one side by the Blackfoot River and, on the other side by the Lolo and Clearwater National Forests. It twists and turns its way for well over one hundred miles offering fantastic views, but precious little in the way of refreshments. We finally found an unassuming motel & diner which offered up a surprisingly tasty (and huge) meal in the form of a double chili burger and a roast beef sandwich (which to Neal’s surprise and my amusement came drowned in a sea of dark brown gravy)

It was enough to see us to our final destination for this post and the main (in fact only) reason we had added Idaho to our itinerary. Anyone who has read Dave Gorman’s book “America Unchained” will be well aware of The Dog Bark Park Inn, a one bedroom B&B housed in a giant wooden beagle. We were fortunate enough that the owners of said beagle, Dennis & Frances were able to accommodate us for one night.

We arrived around 3pm and spent a good couple of hours chatting to them before they showed us to our rooms. I called “shotgun” and exiled Neal to the small sleeping area in the nose, while I took advantage of all the amenities in the main bedroom. It really is, as its lovely owners declare it, “A Noble and Absurd Undertaking”, but it was also provided one of the most comfortable and enjoyable nights I have spent anywhere in the US.

We walked down to the local town to pick up a six pack and sat drinking them on a small deck overlooking the local highway just as the sun began to set over the vast and flat Idaho landscape. We still had over four thousand miles to drive before Road Trip USA 2012 was finished. We had plenty of meals planned and lots of other quirky places to visit.

They would, however, have to work mighty hard, we both agreed, to beat our one night in the belly of the beast.

ROAD TRIP USA 2011: ARE WE NOT MIDDLE AGED MEN?

Our original plan had been to spend no more than one night in each city. However, one morning, about three weeks before Road Trip 2011 was due to begin, I received a slightly giddy e-mail from Neal asking (actually begging) that we spend one more night in Portland, Oregon so he could go and see one of his favourite bands, DEVO.

You remember them, right? They were a group of rather odd looking Americans in paper suits and funny hats. They had a couple of harmless minor hits in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and then, as far as I was aware had disappeared. Not so, Neal informed me with considerable enthusiasm. They were still going strong and were, in his words “influential”. Who knew? Well, apparently Neal for one.

I was pretty certain that my life would have been reasonably complete without ever crossing the words “See DEVO” off my bucket list, but Neal was very keen indeed and, as you all surely know by now I am a constant delight of a man who always goes out of his way to support a chum. So, I agreed to extend our stay in Portland. First of all, of course, we had to get there. We grabbed a quick breakfast at our hotel in Newport and hit the road for Portland before too much other traffic was stirring.

Neal, in his official position of “finder of weird stuff to keep us amused” had planned one stop along the way, at The Evergreen Aviation & Spacecraft Museum in the otherwise inconsequential town of McMinnville. The displays of planes and aeronautical ephemera were interesting enough, but Neal had marked it out to visit for one particular reason.

In the late 1980’s the owner of the museum had put in an unlikely bid for the “Spruce Goose” the gargantuan sea plane that Howard Hughes had spent millions of dollars creating merely to prove that such a beast could fly. Fly it did, for all of ten seconds, after which Hughes never boarded it again.

It had languished in Long Beach for decades, but was now up for grabs. Despite counter bids from The Smithsonian and others, The Evergreen museum won out, primarily because they promised to restore the plane and to build a special building so it could be displayed in its entirety. It took nearly fifteen years to move and restore the beast, but now it stands in all its glory, dwarfing all the other planes in the collection.

It was a fun stop, but after an hour or so of taking pictures of the thing from various angles, we were both “goosed out” and ready to head to our final destination of the day.

Portland, Oregon had been on my list of US cities to visit for as long as I can remember and, after checking in to our downtown hotel, we set out to see what delights it had to offer. Quite a lot as it happens. Portland may be a small city, but it has a tangible sense of civic pride and enough places of interest for me not to begrudge having to spend an extra day within its city limits.

One of those attractions was obviously the fact that Portland is renowned as one of the best eating cities in the whole of the United States. Just as Neal had done with the quirky stop offs on route, so to had I done my research on places to decent meals. I had made a reservation to have our first meal in the city at a well regarded restaurant called Beaker & Flask.

After spending a few hours rooting around in the wonderful Powell’s “City of Books” and enjoying a couple of pints in one of the city’s many brew pubs, we freshened up back at the hotel and hopped into a cab to head across river to Portland’s industrial district.
There is a rant coming up in a moment folks. Be warned.

Beaker & Flask is, as you can see from the menu, a restaurant that celebrates the pig (here comes the rant)

RANT BEGINS: Now, I love the pig as much as the next man. In fact, I probably love the pig and its porky products more than the next man, and the man next to him and so on. I love Pork Pies, roast pork, sausages and I have even started to make my own bacon for heaven’s sake. All that being said, the ‘we worship the pig” trope on display in so many restaurants these days is becoming rather tiresome. If I see one more menu emblazoned with an outline of a pig, arrows pointing to its various cuts, or one more twenty something chef with assorted pork based tattoos up and down his arm, I am going to do someone a serious mischief: RANT ENDS

All the above being said, Beaker & Flask was not half bad. The pre-dinner cocktails were terrific, a snackette of deep fried strips of pigs ear was just as it should be, crunchy, salty and delicious and, while the main courses were better on the page than they were on the plate, they were still good enough for us to declare the meal excellent value and a good start to our time in the city.

Better was to come the next morning, however. We had, to use the old expression “tied one on good and proper” during our first night in the city and, although I had woken up at about 6am, it was closer to 8am before I was able to open my eyes and face the inevitable consequences of the over indulgence of the previous night.

Neal was in pretty much the same state, although much less stoic about it and we both agreed that what was in order was a heaping helping of breakfast. Fortunately, my research had also thrown up (bad choice of words given our condition) a perfect location near to our hotel. Mother’s was a pleasingly buzzing little bistro that was already filling up as we were shown to our table. Service was pleasant and efficient and it was only a matter of minutes before Neal was sighing with relief at his first cup of coffee and I was guzzling down a huge glass of restorative fresh orange juice.

The food was, quite frankly, pretty fantastic. Neal’s eggs Benedict were as good as you are likely to see anywhere while my own plate contained two perfectly cooked eggs “over medium” alongside the same number of piping hot crumbly biscuits, submerged in a thick southern style sausage gravy. It may have been too much food for either of us to finish, but it was just what we needed and set us up properly for a day’s walking around the city.

Neal’s research had led him to believe that I might enjoy spending some time at the legendary (ahem) Stark’s Vacuum Cleaner Museum. Quite why he thought this might be the case, I have no idea. However, in need of a walk after such a huge meal, I tagged along and spent, oh a good thirty seconds being enthralled by a collection of decaying old carpet cleaners in the corner of a large vacuum cleaner shop.

My slightly snarky lack of enthusiasm was enough to convince us both that we had perhaps better spend some time apart. We went our separate ways to promising to meet up in time for supper before the concert that evening. I Have no idea what Neal got up to, but as I walked back to the hotel determined to catch up with some work, I was distracted by the girlish yelping of some young women in skimpy costumes.

It appears they were something called cheerleaders and hailed from one of the local colleges. They were doing things with their lithe young bodies which would, I am certain, ensure they all would have no trouble finding a husband. I spent a very enjoyable half an hour admiring their athleticism (and not letching like a middle aged pervert, I deny that completely) before heading back to the hotel.

By 6pm, Neal had returned and we were both fully restored to our previous good humour and ready to rock out as much as it might be suitable for any middle aged man to do.

Supper, our last meal in the city, was at another highly recommended restaurant. The name PING may suck, but the food did not. Chef Andy Ricker obviously knows his South East Asian food and recreates many of the region’s best drinking foods without too much neutering or apology for ingredients that some might consider unusual.

All this led us to our real reason for spending one more day in Portland. DEVO were due to play in The Crystal Ballroom, a famous venue that boasted one of the few remaining floating dance floors still in use. The crowd was an interesting mix of both young and old, with a lot of parents obviously bringing their teenaged kids along so they could hear what music used to be like when it was any good.

By the time DEVO finally arrived on stage, I was yawning frequently enough to make me realize why I rarely venture out after 10pm these days. They on the other hand, despite being well into their late 50’s and early 60’s showed no such lack of energy, entertaining the packed crowd for long enough for us not to get back to the hotel until long after midnight.

I am not going to claim that seeing DEVO changed my life, but Neal seemed pleased enough and it had also given us a reason to spend another day in this splendid city. Trust me I plan to spend more days there as soon as I get the chance.

However, we had the next stage of Road Trip USA 2011 ahead of us. Next stop, Montana.