15 days and 3,750 miles but no fast food

Finding good food on our driving vacation down the East Coast, over to Louisiana, and back wasn't easy but we did it -- with the exception of one really awful meal. We had some terrific meals in unlikely places and ate like royalty in New Orleans.

Local restaurants usually don't advertise on the interstate. And venturing a few miles off the highway in search of food isn't always rewarded. We never took the easy way out by stopping at one of the hundreds of McDonald's, Burger Kings or Wendy's. The one time we had lunch at a Denny's was a disaster.

Despite all the fast food, there are lots of people knocking themselves out every day to prepare slow food and we were delighted when we found one of them. One is a Jersey girl who is now a caterer and runs a lunchroom in a small town in Georgia and the other is "a country cook" who took over half of the convenience store at a truck stop in Alabama.

I'll tell you more about them and what we ate in the next several days. Today, I went to Costco in Hackensack to stock up on fresh produce, organic salad greens and fresh wild salmon.