California Eatin'

It has been a while! But I'm back.

With a space key I'm having a hard time getting to work properly.

I took a road trip to California and got back in September, but I guess it just took me longer than usual to settle back into routine. When you have a couple weeks of freedom to just be able to hop into the car and just drive across the country, seeing new things after a long while, routine gets very hard to be friendly with.

Personally, I think the road-trip feeling is how life should be. We shouldn't be caught up in any routine or any systems or bound by synthetic materials such as money. . .because we only live once. Once. But we become robots in a life of slave labor all for things that don't matter in the end. I came across a quote somewhere that I like - "Wild nature is your true nature, crucified by world civilization." It could not ring more true.

Let me say, on a trip with nothing but gas stations that offer nothing healthy to eat or fast food drive-thrus that offer pretty much nothing vegan (and pretty much nothing at all if you're like me and can't eat bread), Whole Foods Market is a life saver if you map them out ahead of time. All the barren areas in between Michigan and California, though, I overfilled on bananas and kiwis. By the time we reached California, I had a stomach ache because of the built up acidity of the kiwis! Fun!

And aside from all that, I ate good. In fact, we didn't get to try all the places we wanted to try because two restaurants were so good, we just kind of found it difficult to stray anywhere else. In Los Angeles, Rahel's vegan Ethiopian Cuisine on Fairfax repeatedly tempted us into their doors the days after we first tried it. Their platter. . .talk about incredible. Their tea wasn't as strong as I would have liked. . .but their sampler platter made up for any possible downfalls a hundred times over. And then, in San Francisco, we somehow just kept kind of finding ourselves each day in Herbivore on Divisadero. I had the red curry, Indonesian noodle salad, chili and corn bread. . .and my boyfriend and I split a lush piece of carrot cake. Mmmm. He had a shawarma, some amazing potato salad. . .my friend had some sort of sandwich and some awesome cookies. . .and whatever else they each had I really don't recall. I guess because I was so absorbed in the heaven going on in my mouth. I wish I could have put these places in my pockets and taken them home.

Kalamazoo, MI, has no such thing and could really use something like that.