Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Sunday, July 24, Hood River, Oregon
I've eaten quite a few pancakes. Fueling a long bicycle trip amounts to shoveling in cal-
ories at remarkably high volume in remarkably brief intervals, and one thing this means
for me is breakfast, a meal I generally dispatch with a mouthful of something—a banana,
say, or a piece of toast with peanut butter—as I head out the door to the office. I don't
ordinarily wake up hungry, especially if I eat a big dinner the night before, and I have
been vacuuming in enormous meals every night.
That said, you wouldn't believe what I'm scarfing down every morning: eggs, toast,
bacon, and stacks of light, cakey pancakes the size of Frisbees with warm syrup and
scoops of soft, sweet butter. I would like to compliment Oregon's pancakes; the qual-
ity—at Riley's Restaurant & Lounge in Seaside (skip the frozen strawberries), at the
American Café in Lafayette, at the Cazadero Inn in Estacada—has been uniformly high.
I've had a number of good dinners, too. I don't know if Oregon has a higher regard
for cooking than other states, or if restaurant food in out-of-the-way places has vastly
improved over the past eighteen years, but one thing I recall from cycling cross-country
in 1993 is that when I stopped randomly for a meal I was rarely gratified, to put it kindly.
Every town seemed to have two restaurants, a fast-food franchise and Mom's.
