Haha, “the world collapsed.”
Happy late 70th birthday from last year!
Wow that Alaska cruise sure sounds nice! =)
Route 66 would be an incredibly long trip…
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I’m not exactly familiar with the care package model you’re referring until I just looked it up.
And that sure sounds interesting!
The only care package I know of is BarkBox for dogs…because my sister has a dog. xD
I think we reckoned about three weeks - which is our usual length for a transatlantic trip (even before we retired).
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We have done a lot of road trips since we retired in 2001, round trips from New Jersey to Idaho (we called it “Lewis & Clark Country”), to Los Angeles, to Arizona, to Utah, to Texas, to the Canadian Rockies, and to the Atlantic Provinces. Most were about four weeks; several included a science fiction convention as part of the trip. We did do a five-week trip through the South (“Civil War and Civil Rights”) back in the 1990s.
Now we’re older, and that long a trip is probably not going to happen. So make sure you travel when you are young. (That was advice given to us by all the older people on our four-week trip to China when we were in our thirties, and good advice it was.)
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Rail?
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I think we may be taking the same view. If not now, then probably fairly soon. It’s tiring to be on the move pretty much all the time. And, whilst I don’t really like to admit it to myself, I think I’m getting less confident about driving on the “wrong” side of the road.
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Right. Good advice to the young ones.
“Your money will return, your time won’t.”
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Yeah right? I don’t know how people could visit # of states in a # of weeks.
Like, it feels so rushed…
But the point for us was stopping at places along the way, not just getting from A to B. And lots of these places were not near any rail stations (or bus routes)–small museums, remote National Monuments, etc. We rarely had a day of just driving (except through Kansas, because after all our trips, we frankly have seen just about all we could find of interest west of Hutchinson).
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I have friends whose son was getting his grad degree from Kansas. They wanted to visit him and look for interesting things to do while he was in class. His previous stops were Penn and Columbia–easy entertainment. Kansas? Nothing.
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I guess your friends weren’t into BBQ and music.
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I guess not.
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While not an amuse, unlimited chips and salsa are a must at all Tex-Mex places in Texas. Yes it’s built into pricing and a lot is thrown away. It is considered necessary or the restaurant will not survive. 
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I suppose similar to the “free” poppadums & chutneys at many Asian restaurants.
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According to the Texanist, San Antonio restaurants are bucking that trend:
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Aww more nice things being taken away. =(
I know here in California, some restaurants are charging for the “free” bread as well.
Thanks for sharing the article, Jolly! =)
This appears to track to the uptick in food prices overall. Higher costs are passed on to the consumer, sooner or later.
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Ian’t that an improvement? Surely a separately priced menu item for bread means you can order it if you wish, or not order it. When it’s “free”, it’s going to be delivered to your table whether you want it or not.
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Agreed, John!
Hate to see all that free bread going into the dumpster. =(
In my part of the UK, the number of places that offer “free” bread is rapidly decreasing. And many of those that still do, now have it as a chargeable item.
I find it quite common in Spain that a small “table charge”, maybe a euro or so, is added to the bill to cover bread. There, an increasing number of tourist orientated restaurants have a note on their menu explaining this is the local custom but, if you don’t want the bread, just tell your server. Me, I always want the bread, “free” or not.
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