My favorite place to eat in all of New Hampshire is LA Burdick’s in Walpole. It’s a chocolate shop and cafe and I’ve never had anything there that isn’t sinfully delicious. We took my mother-in-law there for Mother’s Day this year. We started the meal with their delightful cheese plate. This featured four cheeses in a range of intensities, a delightful fruit chutney, olives, seasoned nuts, and crackers. The cheeses were all wonderful and could be purchased at the market next door, many are by local artisans. We took home a creamy sheep’s milk cheese and a tangy blue.

For entrees Judith, my mother-in-law and I both enjoyed the salad nicoise. This version featured perfectly prepared tuna, egg, roasted peppers, new potatoes, green beans, and some delightful pickled red onions. My husband had the steak frites, cooked to perfection. We enjoyed this with a couple of glasses of house wine. The meal was simply scrumptious.

At Burdick’s desert is not an option. Unless you are a robot, their sweet confections are quite simply too good to pass up. Judith and Casey, my husband, both had frappes made from Burdick’s homemade ice-cream. Judith had the chocolate-banana and Casey had the chocolate-strawberry. The frappes were thick and a rick dark-chocolate in color. I sampled both and I can honestly say that these were the most delicious frappes I’d ever had. I had the hazlenut-orange cake and it was perfect, nutty and sweet.

Of course, I can’t leave Burdick’s without a take-home treat. The brazilian chocolates are my favorite, I savor their rich taste long after I’ve returned home. When I run out, I know its time to go back.

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We didn’t get to go to Barstow as planned, but I couldn’t leave Las Vegas without a peak at the desert. Fortunately, Red Rock Canyon isn’t far from town, and the Blue Diamond Highway does a nice loop there and back.

Along the way I found that the town of Blue Diamond has a new welcome sign, but the old text remains: “elevation: high, population: low, burros: ?” I stumbled across an upended car standing like a tombstone exclaiming “dirt man rocks.” The Oliver Ranch sign above is just across the road from the BLM’s Welcome To Red Rock Canyon sign. That’s where Vincent from New York found me. He pulled up in a cherry red Dodge Viper and asked for my help getting pictures of him with his car. We got shots with him standing at every corner and both doors, which is probably what I’d want to do if I was driving that car.

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What didn’t work out because of our problems with the hotel was our drive to Barstow to see Sandee’s friend Joanne.

I don’t know much about the town, but Wikipedia told me to look out for the original Del Taco, Rainbow Basin Natural Area (site not loading now, try this instead), Calico Ghost Town, and the old Solar One solar energy generating experiment. Along the road, however, is the the World’s Tallest Thermometer, in Baker, California.

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There is, supposedly, some historical meaning to our Thanksgiving holiday, but all I can figure out is that I wasn’t there and it probably didn’t go as I’ve been told. Thing is, Thanksgiving isn’t so much about what we were, but who we are. Thanksgiving celebrates the two most important things in life: food and family.

Almost unique among US holidays, retailers haven’t yet found a way to commercialize it. International readers may wonder how a US holiday can exist without commercial involvement, but they should know that we make up for it in the way we eat. We will stuff ourselves, then get seconds and perhaps more. We will tell stories or play a game. Then we will have desert; apple and pumpkin pies are the tradition. After that, it’s back to the turkey again.

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