The Travelogue: February 2008 Archives

Edible State

I read somewhere once that nine out of ten new restaurants fail, that the crowded market and the high first-year costs conspire to ruin nearly all new ventures.

This statistic, most assuredly, does not apply to Texas.

On a warm late January night, wearing shirtsleeves, I cruised through the northwest Houston suburbs in a powder blue Kia Rio, modern country music on the two-speaker radio, manual windows rolled all the way down. Reflected in the windshield as I leaned forward, endless neon lights that would rival even the Las Vegas Strip. But these signs were advertising strip steaks, chicken strips, batter-fried fish sticks.

Chains of Love

The Donner Party, those westbound settlers who were looking for gold to pan and ended up as each other's dinner, was a contingent cut in half by the towering gateway that separates two areas that came to be Nevada and California. Donner Pass is named for the group that was 87 strong on the east side of the mountains in the summer of 1846, and only 48 when survivors emerged the next spring. A 7,840-foot mountain can be cruel like that.

One hundred and sixty-one winters later, a college basketball reporter zoomed up that oversized hill, ears popping to the rhythm of a rock and roll song on the radio. He -- I mean I -- had rented a gold-colored Kia Rio at San Jose International Airport earlier that day, and after a three-hour stop at a UC-Davis game, took to the mountains. Late one clear and cold Thursday night in January of 2008, I pulled over at a mountainside rest area, kept the engine running for heat, and dreamed high country dreams.