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• Watch City Brewery – rotating selection of homemade microbrews. Try the Titan Ale, and come winter, the Frostbite.
• Bison County – excellent bbq with best sweet potato fries in town and a fine list of whiskeys
• Indian restaurants – five of them in as many blocks. New Mother India and Bombay Mahal come to mind.
• Tom Can Cook – intriguing Korean and Thai dishes, great appetizers, quiet mood
• Lizzy’s Ice Cream – it’s all good … spice lovers must try the Mango Madness, made w/ habanero peppers

Then over to Fairbanks, down to Anchorage, and return via the Inside Passage to finish in peaceful, urbane Vancouver.

I’m not making this up. It was 1977 and I was hitchhiking from NY to the Canadian Rockies. A trucker dropped me off on I-90 outside Pierre, SD. After baking in the July sun for a couple hours, I started to assume that my appearance, large backpack, and probable odor were dooming me to take the bus.

Then a car stopped. The driver was a blond woman, maybe 20, in a bikini top and denim cutoffs. Ohmigod: a Penthouse Forum moment. I got in, and she set off at 100 m.p.h. for Rapid City, 220 miles up the road. She was a stripper, she said, and commuted between clubs in each city. Her boyfriend, a policeman, lent her a car with a police radio—she tapped it proudly—so she could avoid tickets.

Ooo-k. Making chitchat, I asked her if she thought it was a good idea to pick up scruffy-looking strangers on the side of the road. She reached under her seat and pulled out a large pistol, one of the very few actual guns I have ever seen. She said: I’m not worried, because we’re not going to have a problem, are we?

You meet the most interesting people on the road.