Tucson, and the Great Saguaros, and Zeman’s
On our way to the interstate from Tombstone, we see our first giant Saguaro, one of the reasons we wanted to stop in Tucson. It is awe-inspiring, just growing in someone’s front yard, about two stories high. Did you know that these giant cactus only grow in a very limited environment? Tomorrow, we are going to the Saguaro National Park; we can hardly wait.
Meanwhile, we check in to our very odd Residence Inn. It is near the Tucson airport, and it looks like a resort, but when we go to use the pool, it isn’t even filled, it is being repaired. Repaired? It looks brand new.
It is in an area with a lot of other new looking hotels, near the airport, but while in other places there are usually a lot of restaurants around the airport, in Tucson, there are few, and not ones we care about.
Using our Trip Advisor research, and our Google Maps App, we find Zeman’s. Zeman’s is Ethiopian, and gets great reviews. We love Ethiopian food, and because most of what we order is vegetarian, we also know it is really good for us.
It is an easy drive into the big city, and we find Zeman’s right where it is supposed to be. We are warmly welcomed when we go in, and take a look at the menu.
They do something we really like; they have a combination where you can order one meat and two vegetables. We ordered two combinations, as did most of the other customers, and it was delicious!
We really loved the ground beef, which was exotic and spicy, and the collard greens, also exotic and spicy, but with different spices. I always think of Vargese’s Cutting for Stone when I eat Ethiopian food. When I read it, I felt like I had grown up in Ethiopia.
It’s in the university part of town, and most of the customers appeared to be students and faculties who enjoy good eats at reasonable prices. Zeman’s is exactly that. Tucson is blessed to have such a delightful restaurant. I understand there is another Zeman’s and even a third one in the planning. 🙂
Benson, AZ and the Horseshoe Cafe
Sometimes your schedule doesn’t work out exactly. We had planned on lunch in Tombstone, but when we leave the interstate at Benson, we are too hungry to drive the additional miles and look for a place in Benson. There are a lot of cars and motorbikes parked at the Horseshoe Cafe, so we decide to give it a try. We have to wait about 20 minutes for a table; it’s Sunday morning and everyone in Benson has come from church to have breakfast.
Once we got inside, we could see that this was a really popular place. People just kept coming.
I think I had a Reuben, which was just average. AdventureMan had a breakfast – portions are huge! They served some of the biggest biscuits I have ever seen! We were already conspicuous by being “not-from-around-here” and I didn’t want to draw more attention to ourselves by photographing the meals. Sometimes I can get away with it but everyone was seated too closely together, and our table was to central.
Some places attract bikers like a magnet. Tombstone is one of them. There were a whole group of bikers parked in front; my impression was that they take temporary jobs around Tombstone as cowboy-actors.
Blue Onion in McAllen, TX: A Great Surprise
Sometimes you get a great surprise when you least expect it. We needed to get on the road, but we also needed lunch, so we just needed “a place” somewhere, anywhere we could find something decent, something acceptable. We weren’t going for great.
We got great.
The Blue Onion looked kind of new, it still had that new smell. It’s walls were a froggy green. It’s floor was a froggy green. Never-mind, we just need to eat and run.
But the staff was warm and welcoming and chatty-in-a-good-way, and the menu was intriguing. We saw one man order Bouillabaisse. In McAllen, TX. I ordered a Pizza Putanesca, and AdventureMan ordered some kind of barbecue wrap.
Even the ice tea was delicious. When my pizza came, it was divine, memorable, maybe one of the best pizzas I have ever eaten. AdventureMan was chowing down on his wrap, making sounds of joy, little moans of pleasure as he ate. His side salad of black beans was also very good, very fresh tasty with lime and cilantro combined with some spices in a delicious way.
Our just-a-quick-stop-before-we-hit-the-road stop turned out to be a meal highlight of our trip. 🙂
Mission, TX, Delights and Surprises
Mission, TX was full of surprises. It looked small on the map, like a little strip of city, not so much. We are here on a mission, AdventureMan wants to visit the National Butterfly Center (did you know the United States had a National Butterfly Center?) and I wanted to see the Rio Grande.
Mission was big, and modern. Contrary to much of our Texas experience, it has very new roads.
Mission, and McAllen, her next door sister city, are right on the Rio Grande. There is a huge Homeland Security presence in Mission and McAllen. Many of the TripAdvisor reports I had read to find a good hotel seemed to have been written by government workers, so I should have put it together, but I didn’t, and I found the hugeness of the security presence a little overwhelming, and seriously intimidating. I am guessing all the new infrastructure is in support of guarding our borders.
Our hotel was very new, very modern and welcoming. It was all polished surfaces and glossy textiles, clean white linens, totally lovely for a chain hotel. We jumped into our swimsuits to hit the equally lovely pool, only to discover it was really cold, and for an Alaska girl to say a pool is cold, it really has to be cold.
Fitness goals thwarted, we checked at the desk for a local restaurant recommendation. The desk clerk was very helpful, but recommended a chain, and we wanted something more truly local. Fortunately, there is Trip Advisor. In minutes, we found a place that thrilled our hearts. It was a Thursday night date night kind of place for the very married. People were flocking in and ordering platters of BBQ. The Lone Star was our kind of place.
We are not people who like to waste, so AdventureMan had to take about half of his beef brisket back to the hotel, thinking he would have some for breakfast. It was very lean and beautifully smoked. Unfortunately, we discovered we did not have a refrigerator in this lovely hotel, oh AARRGH, and the excess beef went to waste.
I had my favorite, BBQ chicken, and a really good potato salad. Normally, I am not a big potato salad fan, I don’t like too much mayonnaise, and I like flavor. This was really good potato salad, for me, and very tasty.
The entire time we were there, people were flooding in. We really liked the Lone Star BBQ. We do a lot of talking with locals, so we later learned that everyone goes to Lone Star for it’s famous grapefruit pie. Grapefruit pie had not sounded all that tempting to us, but before Homeland Security, Grapefruit was the mainstay of the Mission, TX economy, and Lone Star BBQ specializes in a wonderful, very sweet, Grapefruit Pie.
I have a feeling that in order to make grapefruit into a pie, it’s kind of like rhubarb, you have to use a lot of sugar, a LOT of sugar. I would rather like to try one spoonful of a grapefruit pie, just for a taste, but I am not all that sorry that we passed, only that it is something that Mission was once famous for.
Beaumont and Refugio, TX en route to Mission, TX
This is an exciting day; this is a day we travel new roads, roads we’ve never travelled before. New roads make our blood race.
First, we have to get through Houston. It’s early in the morning, so Houston friends, I didn’t call. I know you’ll appreciate it 🙂
One of the best parts of this trip was crossing rivers. We crossed lots of rivers. These are some of the rivers we crossed:
Brazos River
Colorado River (we crossed the Colorado many times on our journey)
Lavaca River
Arenosa River
Garzitas Creek
Guadalupe River
San Antonio River
Aransas River
Texas can be a very dry state, but after this winter and spring, southern Texas is as green as Alaska, and the rivers are flowing. We learned that a swale is the same as an arroyo; we know them better as wadis – places where rivers or creeks may sometimes run, but which may also dry up. In a country like Tunisia, when we lived there, there were not a lot of public facilities available, so a bridge over a wadi always was a welcome sight.
We trust in Google, but sometimes we don’t thoroughly understand the instructions. On this route, when we got to Victoria, they told us to take the Southern business route, so we exited and tried to find it, but discovered (it was only about ten minutes) that the road we had been on was the southern business route around Victoria.
Some of the worst roads we travelled were in Texas. At one point, we gassed up and it was my leg for driving. It wasn’t an interstate, but it was a highway with two lanes going both ways, a 90 degree entrance to the highway, and fast trucks barreling down the road. I am not a person who likes screeching tires, but I had to screech my tires to get on that road, and I still feel resonances of the adrenaline jolt.
Along this long long route 77, we got hungry, and there aren’t a lot of likely stops – it’s a long, lonely road. When we saw the signs for Refugio, our tummies were rumbling and we knew we needed to take a chance.
Sometimes, luck is just with you. As Highway 77 went straight through Refugio, we saw, on the left, a place called Gumbo Seafood, and the parking lot was packed with big trucks, farm vehicles, cars; we’re not even sure we can find a place, and just as we start to turn into one, a big huge lawn-service kind of double truck takes it and we are forced to go to the back, where we find a spot. Inside, it is packed with customers, and loud, and food is going to the tables and it looks . . . Mexican!
We are shown to a table in a quieter area, where we order. When my meal comes, I am delighted – grilled shrimp, with sauteed onions and green peppers, a very hot pepper of some kind, and about half an avocado sliced. It was magnificent. In this hopping roadside stop, I had one of the best meals of my trip. AdventureMan’s tacos were stuffed to the brim, so much meat he couldn’t eat half of it, and he said it was not tasty, so he would rate this place lower than I would. Sometimes, it’s all in what you order, and there is no telling what you’re going to get. I loved this meal!
For some reason, we assumed all the seafood was frozen, and wondered how an interior town would specialize in seafood. Once we saw the larger map, however, we saw they weren’t all that far from the Gulf, and we had evidence that at least the oysters were very fresh:
A lot of times, we run across fun places to stop along secondary and back roads, but we didn’t find any fun places this time, like for home made goodies. It was all rural and agrarian, and a lot of it looked like it had seen better days, until we got to Mission, TX.
The Nomadic Life: Our Journey to the American SouthWest
We still get restless. AdventureMan still gets calls asking him to come check something out, even goes back to Doha now and then, and I visit family. But we get so restless. We need the stimulation and challenge of other ways of seeing things, other ways of thinking, new sights, new smells, new adventures. There are so many places I have never seen!
Some people are just wired that way. I can remember, even as a young girl, being at the Juneau Airport, smelling that aviation fuel smell, and wishing I were going somewhere. It’s just the way I’m wired. I still love the smell of aviation fuel.
I am so lucky to be married to a man who indulges me. AdventureMan isn’t wired precisely the same; he is better at growing roots than I am, but he still likes to shake things up a little when it’s all same same same, day after day.
We’ve both had to adjust. I grew up in a family where when we were going, say from Germany to Italy for a vacation, we got up early and went, as AdventureMan so colorfully puts it, “balls to the walls” driving 12, 13 hours until we dropped from exhaustion. We were just intent on getting there. AdventureMan’s family traveled in shorter segments. It’s taken us about 40 years to find a happy medium. He has adjusted to sharing the driving with me. I’m a good driver, and I love driving. He goes to sleep, and I can drive for hours, it’s sort of a zen thing.
So off we went. We put over 6,500 on my two year old car, more than doubling the total mileage. It was a wondrous and joyful journey, full of surprises, full of delights, and with a couple days of truly awful driving.
We packed too much. When you are going someplace every couple days, you really don’t need a lot of clothing. I worked out of a large duffel; I would put what I needed for the next day or couple of days in a smaller bag to carry into the hotels.
At our church, we collect toiletries for the homeless population in Pensacola and the recovery population. I came back with a lot of toiletries 🙂
Our first day was to Beaumont, TX. No particular reason to stop in Beaumont, it was just a good place to stop en route to where we were going, which was The National Butterfly Center and the National Birding Center, both of which happen to be in Mission, TX. Mission is right on the border, on the Rio Grande, and I have never seen the Rio Grande before and wanted to see it.
When lunchtime came, we were just passing Baton Rouge, where one of our very favorite restaurants, Al Basha, serves mouthwatering Arabic food. It’s just off I-10, we can see it from the road and what a great way to start our journey. But as we enter, every table is filled!
No worries, the waiter hurries over and leads us to a table way in the back, against the wall, which happens to be my favorite place. They have stuffed vegetables on the menu, which AdventureMan orders in a heartbeat, and of course, too much food comes.
We first became acquainted with stuffed vegetables long ago, living in Amman, Jordan, where it was a very common dish, served to family and to guests alike. Later, living in Kuwait, my friends knew how much AdventureMan loved stuffed vegetables and would make extra for him when they were preparing food for family or gatherings. What great memories this lunch brought back!
Louisiana is a quirky state, a state we like a lot. At a gas station near Lafayette, we saw three restaurants and an antique shop, including one with Lebanese food.
By the time we got to Beaumont, it was nearly dinner time. Beaumont is an oil refining town, and the hotel was full of men working in the refineries or about to be hired to work in the refineries. It was a very male populated environment. I went to the pool, but there was a large group of men sitting out on the patio by the pool, and I didn’t stay long, I wasn’t comfortable. It reminded me of the Middle East. I don’t like being oogled.
We were still so full from our Al Basha lunch that we found a local supermarket and got salads for dinner. It was a great first day on the road.
Santino’s in Woodstock, GA
We had the most wonderful time visiting our friends in Atlanta, and getting to see their new restaurant, Santino’s. Santino’s is not a chain, but is family owned. There are several, with small differences from restaurant to restaurant. The food at the Santino’s in Woodstock, GA is fabulous.
I had heard about these garlic knots, so I was eager to try them. They are so delicious I had to push them away so I wouldn’t fill up on them!
They have my very favorite pasta – aglio oglio, simple pasta with garlic, oil and parsley.
Oh! The Vegetable Pizza is out of this world! The crust is made with special water to give it that New York thin crust pizza special taste!
AdventureMan loves Caprese Salad, and his was fabulous:
My Ceasar salad:
When it came time for my Ceasar Salad, they grilled up the most delicious pounded chicken breasts:
And a mixed pizza, half veg, half pepperoni. So much food!
We are so happy for our friends, making their dreams come true. They have a wonderful location, just outside downtown Atlanta, where everyone is buying and building. We wish them great success.
George Artisan Bakery and Restaurant in Pensacola
We got so spoiled, all the years we lived abroad, by really good bread. When George opened, we couldn’t wait to go try their bread offerings. We weren’t disappointed.
First, their baguettes have that firm, crispy outside, and soft, tasty inside that we look for. Their challah is like eating a sweet cloud, and their combination pumpernickel/rye is perfect for sandwiches. Welcome, George! We are so glad you are here!
George is on Garden Street, near E.
George has the buzz – George is hot, and fills up fast at lunch. People know a good place when they find it:
George has a wonderful selection of freshly baked breads with only healthy ingredients:
My divine Salade Nicoise – crunchy green beans, tasty olives and perfectly grilled tuna.
AdventureMan’s Divine Beet Salad – fabulously tasty.
George has a generous offering of pastries daily:
And wonderful tiramisu . . . we almost licked the plate!
Queen of Sheba in Atlanta, ReVisit
We’ve talked about the Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant in Atlanta ever since we found it several years ago. We know just how to get there, so we wait for Atlanta going-home traffic to die down. Atlanta is an hour ahead of Pensacola, so we have time before we get hungry.
It is so cold, and the cold results in a sharp, clear night in Atlanta. All the buildings are beautifully lit; Atlanta looks beautiful at night. We successfully navigate from freeway to freeway and miss our exit, but when we take the next exit – at Emory university – there are all the ethnic restaurants in the world, including the Trip Advisor #1 rated Ethiopian restaurant, Desta, which we briefly consider and then head on to the Queen of Sheba, just minutes down the road.
It is still there, in a shabby looking strip mall next to the Target, between the halal meat shop and the dusty looking shop that sells international plugs and wiring.
We order our favorite, the Vegetarian Injera, and we also order a Tilapia.
Every taste on this Veg plate is different from the other. It is a fabulous dish, enough for two, filling, but also satisfying because of all the tastes. While I don’t normally care about tilapia, the Tilapia below was the best I have ever eaten, crispy and perfectly cooked. You pull the fish off the bone with pieces of injera (the pancake on which you can see the veg dishes) or even with your bare fingers. It was all as delicious as we remembered.
We have so many wonderful restaurants in Pensacola, but no Ethiopian restaurants. The closest is in New Orleans. We know we will be coming back again to the Queen of Sheba.
Jim N Nick’s BBQ in Auburn
Sometimes, on the road, you just have to hope you’re going to be lucky. We weren’t hungry until we got near Auburn, but Auburn is a college town, and college towns, in our experience, usually have a lot of good places to eat.
Very near to the highway, we found Jim and Nick’s BBQ, which I didn’t know was a chain, but it seems to be a regional chain.
First good sign – fabulous smells as soon as we drive up. We can’t wait to get inside; it is freezing, below freezing, it is really, REALLY cold.
The inside is warm and cozy, all woody and country and full of divine smells and we can see great food coming from the kitchen. We have a great server, who guides us through some of our choices.
Their hot sauces are GOOD. Really good!
We both choose Pig On a Bun. It is a pulled pork sandwich with two sides. Our server tells us to order it Memphis style, which has cole slaw on top. We do. It is fabulous.
AdventureMan ordered his with baked beans and potato salad.
I don’t normally stop at chains, but this one was conspicuously high quality. We’d eat there again in a heartbeat.
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