It’s taken us a while, but we’ve finally calculated how much we spent on camping in the US and Canada during our first year on the road. We made 100 stops in the first 12 months and planned to spend an average of $25 a night. We ended up spending $28.60 a night, so we were pretty close!
This included around a month of free camping in Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sites, casino parking lots, one truck stop and the back yards of friends and family.
The Bureau of Land Management sites, where we had spectacular landscapes all to ourselves, were our favorite camping spots of all. We would have stayed in a lot more of these, had we not been on a one-year trip around the country that took in many expensive cities and other popular tourist areas. We also needed pretty constant phone reception for work. Although we stayed in some BLM sites with great phone reception, that doesn’t apply to all of them.
If we had just aimed for the best free camping around the country, where it was neither too hot nor too cold to camp off the grid, the map of our route would have looked very different to the one below. We might have avoided the eastern US, for example. Although we have found excellent free camping at state-run water management areas in Florida, the majority of sites that allow free camping, including Bureau of Land Management and National Forest sites, are out west. 

At the other end of the scale, we stayed in two private campgrounds that cost over $60 a night. One of those was in the Florida Keys, where it’s nearly impossible to reserve a spot in a state park unless you book months ahead, and all the private campgrounds are expensive.
The other one was near Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. That was the second stop of our trip when we were still complete newbies and didn’t realize that you needed to book ahead to snag a good campground near a national park. The third major outlier was the $150 we spent to stay in a hotel in Denver (with Sonny the cat) while our trailer was having some warrantee work done.
In between the completely free sites and the pricey private sites, we’ve stayed in national parks, national forests, national seashores, Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds, state parks, regional parks and city parks for $8 per night and up. 
A big shout out goes to the city park in Torrington, Wyoming, which offers water and electric hook ups for $10 a night! State parks, which often include water and electric hook ups, are also excellent value for money, compared to private campgrounds in the same area, with some pretty gorgeous scenery thrown in. 
We've also found that some camping memberships pay for themselves very quickly if you're traveling full time. We received 10% off several campgrounds because of our Good Sam membership, which we got for free when we bought our trailer at Camping World, but the best deal by far was the $40 we spent on a Passport America annual membership, which gave us 50% off Passport America’s network of campgrounds, including one of our favorite spots of the year: Mount Desert Narrows Camping, near Acadia National Park in Maine. That alone saved us well over $1000 on campground costs in 12 months. Thanks to Passport America, we stayed in a lot of great campgrounds with full hook ups (water, sewer and electric) for around $15 a night.
We’ve also relied on Campendium to find the best camping around the country, free or otherwise. The campground reviews on the Campendium website, which include details about the cell phone service available for different networks, have been invaluable. Now that we’re not traveling like crazy from A to B to C, we need to write some Campendium reviews to help other campers out.
Clearly there have been lots of other costs associated with this trip, but considering some of the expensive cities and other tourist destinations we have visited, $28 a night on camping seems a pretty good deal. We'd love to hear what other people usually pay for camping, if anything at all! Below are some photos, in no particular order, of some of our most memorable camping spots from our first year on the road.

​When we discovered that Grassy Key RV Park and Resort in the Florida Keys had reopened after Hurricane Irma, we were determined to come back. We spent a week here last December and fell in love with this campground and the entire Marathon area. 

​While most buildings around here are still standing, and businesses are reopening all the time, many homes and businesses in the Middle and Lower Keys have been severely damaged. The campground we're staying in experienced no structural damage, but homes and business a few feet away on the other side of the Overseas Highway were not so lucky.

Many people have lost their homes or businesses altogether, either because they were destroyed by the hurricane or because they had to be demolished subsequently. As you drive through the Marathon area along the Overseas Highway, you can see the occasional empty dirt lot, stretching from the highway to the sea, where homes surrounded by lush vegetation once stood. 
​Mike from Florida Keys Mobile RV Service, who fitted a new gas regulator on our trailer, told us he'd been working flat out since the hurricane servicing the FEMA travel trailers that house some homeless residents in Big Pine Key, an area just south of us that was devastated by Irma. He has also been helping customers who are living in RVs in their own yards until their homes can be rebuilt. 
Some public places are also badly affected. The boardwalk at Sombrero Beach has been reduced to a pile of pink rubble and most of the beach is closed. Further south of us, Bahia Honda State Park lost much of its vegetation during the hurricane and its two campgrounds are still closed after suffering major damage. 

All of this is heartbreaking to see, but not completely unexpected. We’ve been surprised, though, by the huge mountains of debris from the hurricane that still line many parts of the Overseas Highway in the Middle and Lower Keys: building rubble, ruined furniture, uprooted vegetation, white goods and even a few boats, trailers and RVs.
Our campground manager told us that although Florida’s Department of Transportation cleared the highway of hurricane debris after the storm, they stopped at the end of October. Monroe County’s contractors are busy cleaning the county roads, so new mountains of debris have been growing along the Overseas Highway as residents start to repair their homes and businesses. We saw that some of this debris has blown onto the beaches and into the mangroves.

Hopefully this will change soon. It’s now illegal to dump more hurricane debris along the Overseas Highway, and according to Monroe County Emergency Management’s Keys Recovery website, the Florida Department of Transportation has finally agreed to send between 25 and 50 trucks to do a final clean up of the highway. They plan to clear it all by mid January.
Meanwhile, Monroe County says its contractors are removing 12,000 cubic yards of debris a day from county roads. We also saw that local residents are taking matters into their own hands and participating in community efforts to clear up the mess.

​When the canals of the Lower and Middle Keys will also be cleared of debris is unclear. According to Monroe County, federal and state agencies have already pulled over 1500 wrecked boats out of Florida Keys waterways. We saw some of those at Sombrero Country Club in Marathon, part of which has been turned into a makeshift boat graveyard.

​But locals who live in Sombrero Beach told us that some of the canals in their area still contained submerged boats, cars and even RVs, as well as a large amount of other trash. For now, a natural disaster that has hurt local residents so badly is also a terrible environmental hazard, but all the residents we've talked to here embody the Keys Strong slogan that has emerged in the wake of the storm. They're determined to restore this beautiful community, and we're sure they will. 

We promised that we'd share our route and some of the highlights from our year-long road trip, so at long last, here is the map with every stop we made in the US and Canada after we drove out of Shane's parents' drive way last October.
If you've been following us on social media, you'll know that we're still on the road (currently in Florida), which is one reason for the delay in putting this post together. But it's also taken us a while to figure out what the stand-out moments of this trip have been so far. Whenever friends and family have asked us to name our favorite place that we've visited in the last year, for example, we've been pretty lost for words.
Where to begin? In 12 months, we made 100 stops, staying in private campgrounds, national parks, national forests, national seashores, Army Corp of Engineers campgrounds, Bureau of Land Management sites, state parks, city parks, one truck stop, several casino parking lots and one friend's back yard.
We set out on this trip to see the great American outdoors. Although we certainly didn't visit every US state or every national park – our route was mostly determined by our desire to be hot places in the winter and cool places in the summer – we still visited 31 national parks, around 20 national monuments, 32 states, three Canadian provinces, two Canadian national parks and drove 30,000 miles in The Beast. Some of those miles traveling between destinations have taken us through the most spectacular scenery imaginable. We've also traveled by kayak, canoe, tractor, sea ship, lake ship, ferry, air boat, light rail, trolley car, subway, bicycle and hiked hundreds of miles.
We've explored many cities that we've always wanted to visit, plus many towns and villages that we never would have discovered, had they not fallen on our route from A to B. We've met so many fascinating people on the road and heard their stories. There have also been a few personal milestones: Shane first's horse ride and first time in a cave; Kathryn learning to drive a 7,000 lb pick up truck, her first ever vehicle since passing her test.
Of course, there have been a few  headaches too. Alongside the euphoric moments, hilarious incidents and wonderful surprises have been disappointments, stresses, a lot of work and a decent helping of drama, such as our high-speed drive to an emergency room in rural Utah, where Shane discovered he had kidney stones. Sifting through all of this has also prompted us to think about what we've learned and how we've changed since we left our lives in New York behind, put all our belongings in storage, bought a truck and trailer and headed into the unknown with a cat.
That will have to be the subject of another post. In the meantime, we figured that the only way we could cram all of our stand-out experiences into one post was to both write a list and then combine them. So here they are, the good and some bad, a sort of road trip flow of consciousness from A to Z:

Alligators, armadillos, ant infestations, Art Basel, Apache Trail, Apalachicola, alpine forests, Angel Oak, Angel’s Landing, Antelope Canyon, Algonquin Provincial Park, Austin.
 
Badgers, beavers, bears, bison herds, beignets, Badlands National Park, Big Bend National Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Big Sky Country, Boulder, boondocking.
 
Chiricahua National Monument, the Chihuahuan Desert, Carlsbad Caverns, Cape Meares, Cape Canaveral, Crazy Horse, Crater Lake, Cliff Palace, the Cascade Mountains, Clingman’s Dome, Coeur D’Alene, Coulee Dam, Colorado Desert, Columbia River Gorge, Canyonlands National Park, condors, coral reefs, campfire chats, charbroiled oysters.
 
Devil’s Playground, Death Valley National Park, Denver, dinosaur fossils, Dinosaur National Monument, Dante’s View, Driftwood Beach, Deadwood.
 
Eagles, elephant seals, elk, Everglades National Park, El Capitan.
 
Flat tires, fire ant bites, freight trains, flower-filled meadows, Frenchmen Street, Fox Theatre.
 
Giant salamanders, Glass Beach, Gettysburg, Galveston, General Sherman Tree, Golden Gate Bridge, Griffith Observatory, Grand Canyon, Glacier National Park, Grand Teton National Park, Grand Prismatic Spring, glass-bottomed boats.
 
Humpback whales, horseback riding, huckleberries, Hollywood, Houston, Hoh Rain Forest, Hurricane Ridge, Houston Mission Control, Half Dome, Horseshoe Bend, hoodoos.
 
Ibis, ice cream, Island in the Sky.
 
Javelinas, Joshua trees, Jekyll Island, Jackson Hole, Jackson Lake, jazz in New Orleans.
 
Key limes, Key West, Knoxville’s World’s Fair Park, kidney stones.
 
La La Land, LACMA, lobster rolls, loblolly pines, live oaks, lupines, Leopard frogs, Lady Bird Johnson Grove, Lake Superior, Lamar Valley.
 
Moose, manatees, marmots, Mount Hood, Mount Hood National Forest, Mojave, Mississippi River, Muir Woods, Multnomah Falls, Marfa, Mendocino coast, Martin Luther King Historic Site, mangrove swamps, The Milky Way.
 
Natchez, Nevada Falls, The Needles, The Narrows, Nevajo Loop Trail, New Orleans.
 
Otters, owls, observatories, Oak Ridge, Old Faithful, Owens Lake, OK Corral, Olympic National Park.
 
Prairie dogs, petroglyphs, poppies, Pinnacles National Park, Point Reyes National Seashore, Palm Springs, Portland, Panther Junction, pow wows, Pacific Coast Highway, Pebble Beach, popovers.
 
Quebec City.
 
Redwoods, roadrunners, Rockies, Rio Grande, Rogue River, Mount Rainer, Mount Rushmore, Roanoke Star, Rialto Beach.
 
Sea turtles, sea lions, sawgrass, Spanish moss, Saguaro cacti, sequoias, Sequoia National Park, Sequoia National Forest, Sierra Nevada Mountains, Space Needle, Sturgess, Steinbeck Center, Skyline Drive, Savannah, Spokane, Smoky Mountains, Scotts Bluff, Surf City, Santa Cruz Pier, Smith Rock State Park, St Joseph’s Peninsula, Salton Sea, solar eclipse, sunsets, stargazing, supermoon.
 
Tumbleweeds, Two Lights State Park, Tombstone, Tybee Island, Thunder Hole, Tunnel View.
 
Upper Peninsula.
 
Vernal Falls, Vermillion Cliffs.
 
White Sands National Monument, Whitefish, Wind Cave National Park, Women’s March, woodpeckers, whiting, waterfalls.
 
Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park.
 
Zabriskie Point, Zion National Park.
 
We didn't say it was going to be a short list! For photos of some of the places mentioned above (but not all of them, we promise) check out the slideshow below.

Last but not least, a travel year is a significant portion of one’s life. It was a long time to be away from home, friends and family, so we'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who visited us on the road; to the old friends, scattered around the country, who we had the rare opportunity to see; and to everyone else for following our travels on social media, keeping in touch and keeping us sane while we were living in various fields for a year. Finally, to the friends that we've met in person or online as a result of our travels, it's also been wonderful to share our adventures with you.  Stay tuned for more!

Before we embarked on this road trip, we spent at least a year figuring out what sort of RV we should buy. Like most people living in apartments in New York City, we didn't have a car or a truck or in fact any mode of transport other than the subway, so we were starting from scratch. We spent a big chunk of each weekend scanning listings on RV sales websites, pouring over floor plans, comparing different models and eventually visiting dealers to check out some of the options in person.
Other than buying something big enough to live and work in with a boisterous cat for a year, our biggest consideration was cost, particularly because we have to sell everything at the end of this trip. The relatively new Class A and Class C motor homes that we looked at were too expensive and we would have had to also tow another vehicle behind us if we were going to venture off road – or even into cities. We didn't want to buy a motor home or any other vehicle more than five years old, because we were going to be covering at least 30,000 miles on this trip, and worried about spending a lot of time and money in repair shops.
So we decided that we would buy either a second hand travel trailer or a fifth wheel and a second hand four-wheel-drive pickup truck to pull it with. We ended up buying a brand new Keystone Bullet trailer on sale, because it was the cheapest and lightest model, either new or used, with the floor plan and other features we wanted within 400 miles of New York. For a tour of our trailer, click here.
We ended up buying The Beast (our trusty Ford F250 Super Duty) because it was the only relatively new pickup truck that had the towing capacity we wanted that we could afford in our area. (Anyone who has ever parked in New York City, or even driven down a street, will understand why massive pickup trucks and 29-foot trailers are hard to come by there.)
Anyway, after spending so long trying to figure out what we should buy ourselves, we've become fascinated by all the different types of campers we've encountered on the road. We expected to see some really massive RVs, and we have, but we've also seen a huge range of smaller homes on wheels that you could camp in pretty much anywhere. What follows is a nerd-tastic slideshow of some of them, starting with the tiniest:

I’ve always adored libraries. In first grade, our teacher brought us to the school library and the librarian explained how everything worked. Her focus was the dewey decimal system and card catalog, but what struck me like thunder was the idea that just for being a student, you got a card to take out any of the books in this big room, for FREE.  I can still scarcely believe it.  
Soon after, Mom took me to our local public library in Flemington, New Jersey, and I was given a card to borrow anything I wanted for free just for being a citizen. The place was huge and my tummy fluttered. How was I going to read all of these free books? Way too many for me to finish in time, before the new ones came out.  
I still feel exactly that same anxiety every time I walk into a bookstore or library.  When I moved to NYC, I was told by the staff member who gave me my card that I was only the second Sesta in their database, going back many years, and unsurprisingly the first Shane Sesta. The New York Public Library is, to me, a cathedral. 
As we’ve traveled around the country, reliable WIFI has often been difficult to find. We are constrained to our campsite while working or writing, and it can feel constricting, especially on rainy days. So I’ve made stops in public libraries along the way. Most have not been the heavy municipal structures I am used to. I don’t know when the architectural trend started, but modern libraries are bright, open buildings, seemingly designed to maximize light and lift ceilings free of the tall stacks. 
A few observations about contemporary public libraries, from the road:

​
Beauty
I’ve already mentioned the architecture.  The landscaping and artwork at many libraries are worth a look as well.  Some have such great sculpture and hanging works, it's like a free visit to a museum or gallery. Books on shelves are a beautiful and inspiring setting themselves.   

WIFI
The WIFI at every library I have visited has been free and FAST. Extremely helpful for uploading road trip videos and hi res photos. 

Printing
There are computers at every library, free for public use, so if you didn’t have one, or yours died while on the road, I guess there’s that. Also, there are printers, so if you are traveling without one, you can email yourself files and print them at the library, usually at a small fee per page. 

Periodicals
If you are like me, one of the awesome things about Barnes & Noble, or any very large bookstore, that is seldom matched by small indie shops is the periodicals rack. The huge stands of shiny, beautiful magazine covers, titles you never imagined existed, expensive niche books, themselves works of fine craftsmanship, and a world of literary magazines make me wish I could just stay there all day drinking coffee and look through everything.  Well, the library has magazine racks, with less titles (depending on the branch), but still more than you could read in a month. Here in Moab’s Grand County Library, I’m sitting near the row containing Western Horseman, Wired and the alluring Writer’s Digest.  
​​
Media
Audio books are great for road trips. Also for exercising, commuting to work, waiting in line, airport delays, riding subways and ferries, going on a blimp. Basically whenever you don’t have hands free for a book or keyboard or motion sickness prevents you from reading. The library has many of these.  If you do not have a library card for the library in question, you can’t check anything out, but you can take them over to the table where you are working. Ripping the CDs onto your computer for later listening is illegal and authors are poor enough already, so the suggestion that this is possible is not an endorsement. Lots of DVDs have also been available at every library I’ve seen.  I will not make a statement endorsing ripping those onto your computer for later viewing either. 

​
Air conditioning and heat
Yes and yes.

Rest rooms
Four stars and up.  Clean and safe.

Librarians
Without exception, I've always found the staff to be smart, helpful and friendly. I've never heard of a library with bad ratings for service – are there any?

Food/wine
Don’t even think about it!    

Here are some of the mushrooms we spotted recently while out hiking in Door County, Wisconsin, and in the Yoop (Michigan's Upper Peninsula).  We weren't sure what was pictured in the last photo, but it turns out that it's a ghost plant.

We discovered after chatting to Roxann that she's clearly on to something. Goshen County's website lists residents and businesses who are offering campers spots on their property and the Bucking Horse Steakhouse on Torrington's Main Street is advertising camping spots without hook ups on its forecourt for $300 a night. To put that in perspective, our campsite in Torrington's Pioneer Park, with water and electricity, cost $10 a night.
It turns out that county officials don't know whether 10,000 or 60,000 visitors will turn up for the eclipse, which is a pretty significant problem. We discovered this when we attended a public meeting in Torrington a couple of days later – by this point, we'd been Torrington residents for four nights, so we were feeling right at home. After receiving our free eclipse-viewing glasses at the door, we learned that the biggest concern is how many day trippers will join the well-prepared eclipse watchers from across the US and overseas, who booked accommodation in Torrington months ago.
"We're one of the closest towns where Denver residents can view the total eclipse, and if it turns out cloudy in Casper [Wyoming's second-largest city] another 50,000 people could come here," said Roger Spears, science advisor to Goshen County's Eclipse Committee.
As a result, Goshen County's Eclipse Committee has been meticulously preparing for this event for over a year. It has plans to deal with everything from food and gas shortages and phone and internet service failures to ground fires and rattlesnake injuries. "Rattlesnakes are numerous this season, we're close to breeding season, they're shedding skin and they're upset," Shelly Kirchhefer, Goshen County's emergency management coordinator, said at the meeting.
Stopping and parking on the verge of county roads and highways will be prohibited during the eclipse, partly because of the fire risk and partly because visitors might step out of their car and on to a snake. Kirchhefer said she's warning all visitors to look at the patch of ground they are standing on very carefully before they look up at the sun. "Wherever you are standing to watch the eclipse, you need to be vigilant."
She's instructing visitors to bring food, water and a full tank of gas with them and went on to urge locals to stock up on food, water and gas early to give Torrington's two supermarkets, stores and gas stations the chance to restock before the eclipse. She pointed out that while emergency services staff would be spread all over, Goshen County can't call on law enforcement personnel from nearby counties, because they are either in the line of totality themselves or dealing with the traffic coming into Wyoming from elsewhere.
"Can't we call in the National Guard?" asked one concerned woman. "They only respond in times of a disaster or emergency," said Kirchhefer. "Folks, this is an event."
It sure is. We were very sad to leave Torrington before the big day, but the first eclipse photos we'll search for on Monday won't be from Kansas City or Casper or any of the national parks, but from here.

​I am not affiliated with Amazon or any retailer or streaming service, but having experimented with a variety of TV, music, film and delivery solutions, I can comfortably recommend Amazon Prime as great all-around value for RV travel. Our number one complaint while out and around in this great country has been the unavailability of decent internet service.  
One of the reasons for this is that a lot of parks, remote towns and wilderness areas are in the mountains. Another is that campground wifi, when available, even in luxury campgrounds, is about the quality that hotel wifi used to be 15 years ago, so at the rare place with a decent connection, everyone else is already streaming and torrenting it into uselessness.  
We have a T-mobile phone with tethering, an ATT phone with no tethering and a Verizon Mifi hot spot.  The hot spot is by far the most reliable, but data is limited (we have a 16GB per month plan) and the rollover is not really what you think (data only carries over for one month and then disappears).
Even with these solutions, we do find ourselves occasionally without any cell or internet service at all, and fairly often with service that is OK for email (for example, 3G or campground wifi) but not sufficient for publishing photos or video or streaming TV or movies.
Amazon Prime video is helpful in this regard because it lets you download videos to your phone to watch later when you have no connection.  Netflix also offers this service, but the Netflix app (for the iPhone at least) does not allow us to mirror the video to our TV.  Downloaded Amazon Prime video can be shared (in our case to Apple TV) and watched anytime, with or without a connection.  
The other main feature of Amazon Prime is, of course, free two-day shipping (now one day in some zip codes, two hours for some items in others). We travel through wilderness, tourist zones and very rural towns, with few shopping options. We are be unable to find some items (iPhone replacement parts, RV parts, etc) when we need them.
Other items, such as RV accessories, are available in campground stores, but at a markup of 200% or more over Amazon prices. Two-day free shipping means that as long as we know we are going to be in a campground for a few nights, we can have almost anything imaginable shipped to the campground office and pick them up. It also means that Sonny can have a new cardboard box.
So, if you are planning a long rural trip and don’t already have Amazon Prime, consider it.  We don’t watch much TV at all, so Amazon Prime has more than we could ever watch. Netflix would be the second best no-wifi option, if you don’t mind downloading at a cafe and watching from your phone or tablet later. Hulu and HBO Now just aren’t for the road.  So please do not tell me anything about Game of Thrones. 

I recently wrote about iNaturalist and a new update includes a powerful new feature I want to share.
Updating the app on June 29, I read the version notes and found the understated description above.
​No fanfare, just “we now give you automatic suggestions”. Which makes sense, because the app is about user photos, and image recognition is the prototypical machine learning/AI application. However, 'universal' image recognition (determining that the subject of a photo is a car, as opposed to a tree) is notoriously much more difficult than specialized applications, such as facial recognition or identifying license plate numbers from images that all contain strings of known characters.
So I kept my expectations in check and tried the new feature.  It is both shockingly good and absurdly fast. This interesting tech post about the feature indicates that it is using the TensorFlow open source Machine Intelligence framework from the 'Google Brain Team' and running on dedicated NVIDIA hardware.  Even if you aren’t interested in sharing or contributing your photos for research, this app seems to be the ultimate, free, comprehensive field guide.  Here is how it works: 
I open the app and choose this photo of a flower from my phone as a new observation.

It first tells me that it is pretty sure about the genus, which is pretty cool.  It then gives me suggestions on the species and shows me which ones have been seen nearby, based on the geotag.  I like the look of the first suggestion, so I touch for more info.
This shows me interesting field guide info and also lets me swipe more pictures.  I can see close ups of the flowers and even compare the leaves of the plant so that I am sure whether or not this is my species. 

​​So that’s pretty cool for flowers, but I’ve seen 'leaf matching' apps before, so let’s see how the same app does with insects and animals.

​​Wow.  Not everything I try gets me an exact match in the first few gos, but I learn more, faster than I would searching in a book.  You can even see a map of the country with observations, to see where each species has been seen before, to help narrow it down.
Up till now I’d been trying photos with fairly representative shapes, with the subject right in the middle. Let’s see how it does on one of the hard problems - a photo with lots of noise and a partial, off-center subject.

​This level of image recognition may become commonplace soon, but for me, this still feels pretty magical. It adds a level of instant gratification to my hiking and nature photography, as long as my hiking companions don’t get sick of my stopping to photograph ants.  Hopefully real-time recognition integrated into a display in my sunglasses will be out in time for Christmas, because, incredibly, it’s now just a matter of design and engineering before we see such products.

In a previous post, I declared Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco as the road trip's best ice cream. As it was pointed out to me by several Portland friends, this was foolishly premature. Portland has something of an attitude, in my opinion, about their craft food, and ice cream is no exception. From what we’ve seen, food creativity is sweeping the nation, but that’s not to say that Portland is not a great place to eat.
We tried several ice creameries in Portland. We went to Ruby Jewel with some friends who migrated to Portland from NYC and their kids. Their twin boys loved Ruby Jewel and it is a great place. One of their specialties is ice cream sandwiches made from any ice cream, a choice of fresh cookies and an interesting list of toppings onto which the edge of the sandwich can be rolled.   
But the new champion is Salt & Straw, which has multiple locations, including California. Their Rhubarb Crumble with Toasted Anise reigns supreme. Imagine a really great rhubarb crumble from a restaurant, the crumbs buttery with a hint of salt. Now blend it into perfectly creamy vanilla with hints of toasty anise nibs.  
The other flavors we tried were great too. Salt & Straw is also an early adopter of a brilliant sizing trend – they allow split scoops so that you can try more flavors in one cone. I ordered a whole scoop of Rhubarb Crumble on the bottom, topped with a split scoop of Honey Lavender (they soak the lavender in the cream) and Pear and Blue Cheese (incredible).

​However, the line out of the door and the free tastings at Salt & Straw were out of control. I was told by another Portlandian that this is by design – they don’t want to streamline the process because the line out the door is free positive advertising. Fair enough, but it would be just as fair for someone to organize an ice cream strike until they institute a no tastings express line. Just don’t do it in July, because who could resist breaking the picket line for Meyer Lemon Buttermilk with Blueberries?