Where's Jack?

Your Favorite Restaurant

Everyone has a favorite restaurant – maybe even more than one.  Perhaps there is a restaurant that is perfect for a quick family meal, or the little mom-and-pop place where you take out-of-town company, or a romantic spot for an intimate dinner for two.  You might even have a favorite restaurant in another city.  Whenever travel allows, this perfect combination of menu and atmosphere always requires fitting a bistro, or a café, or even a diner into the itinerary.  For me, I crave a specific taste, a flavor that combines a splendid splash of memories, tastes, and wilted lettuce.  Yes, I admit it, I am a sucker for Jack In The Box tacos, and since the chain hosts no establishments near me, I constantly equate them with my traveling adventures.

My first taste of the low-cost, low-prep, skinny, greasy-bottomed, crunchy-topped snacks occurred at the franchise adjacent to my elementary school.  My addiction began after I left Arizona and the least-ethnic Mexican food no longer became readily available to me.  I began to plot the locations where I could find that friendly clown in other cities and towns that I frequented.  Both St. Louis and Los Angeles have outlets just at the end of the street from the rental car lots.  Heading west on Interstate 10, at the first exit inside the Texas state line, I found another branch.  Like little taco oases on the path to wherever I may be headed, Jack In The Box greeted me, welcomed me, and gave me a little moment of remembrance to my childhood and to previous expeditions, as well as a quick nibble to keep me satisfied as I hit the road.

Another Sense Of Direction

Stuck in construction traffic on the south side of Lake Tahoe, I have already added a couple hundred miles to the odometer, crossing Donner Pass, touching the waters at Sutter’s Mill, and helping push a stranded traveler out of the snow.  An adventure like this doesn’t need the hum-drum of bumper-to-bumper vehicles.  My saving grace, off the road to the left, I see my beloved Jack.  I pull in, I order the two-for-a-dollar special, and I sit with my laptop and my tasty, unhealthy treat watching for the traffic to clear.  When I landed in El Paso, (see “El Paso, El Paso,” January 2013) Jack held a position across from the airport’s entrance as I turned east.  He always knows right where to be when I need him.

Crossing from Lewiston, Idaho into Clarkston, Washington, Jack again makes an appearance.  I make a mental note, as I have just finished breakfast, and after my brief dart into Oregon (see “I Owe Oregon,” February 2013), I return to his side.  As I sit enjoying my crunchy, greasy, messy flavors, I leaf through my beautiful atlas (see “Traveling With Boys,” November 2011), I place a check-in call with my brother, who also embraces my JITB affliction, and I plot the lengthy afternoon drive up and over Lolo Pass through the Bitterroot Mountains.  With his charming ad campaigns, his bouncy, bobbing antenna toppers, and his irresistibly tempting tacos, Jack In The Box accompanies my adventures, just like my musical soundtrack, the wind in my air, and the beckoning of the open road, making taste another vibrant element of the journeys I have taken.  His low-cost corn tortilla snacks may not be the gourmet selection of more refined palettes, but I connect that taste with the memories of dozens of drives, each one of them savory and simple, but full of spice, aptly affordable, and a taste I frequently crave.

El Paso, El Paso

Bee Sting

Travelling on business implies frequent-flyer miles and expense reports, but my father’s regional accounts just as often meant driving from one college campus to another persuading academic scholars and research fellows that the scientific equipment his company offered superseded any other current technology.  In the twentieth century, top-of-the-line technology changes daily, but in the mid-seventies, when criminology could be branded closer to “Quincy” than to “CSI,” my Dad knew his stuff and his Southwestern road trips sustained our family and occasionally served as the back drop to our summer vacations.

When his traveling road show took our family to the western tip of the Lone Star State, we visited Carlsbad Caverns National Park (see “Hidden Beauty” from March 2012), and several other places that I recall savored of beauty and adventure, places where the sites provided more than ample reward for the time in the car, and places that I would visit again with my own children.  And then there was El Paso, Texas.  I have one vivid memory of the town across the Rio Grande from Juarez: my first bee sting.  Let’s just say the sting of El Paso stayed in my memory for quite a while.

Smoke Across the Border

 

I admit there are cities I plan to see, but flight schedules and itineraries often negate the opportunities, like Oakland and Spokane, Pittsburgh and San Antonio.  And to get to Carlsbad Caverns, El Paso or Midland would have to serve as the rental car pick-up and drop-off point and little else.  Recalling my first experience in El Paso, I site, just  seriously contemplated Midland, but price trumped memory and so my flight touched down hours from my final destination. Once I exited the plane in this 600K+ city, I was refreshingly surprised to find rental cars on out the doorway of a delightfully small, yet fully-functional, well-themed terminal, and a charming place from which to depart on my three-day adventure.

 

Across the river into Ciudad Juarez, smoke from a distant fire rose into the smoggy horizon, yet to the east, I drove past a dozen landmarks I had eyed from my airplane window: wind turbines, and mountain peaks, green pastures and sharp bends in the road. As I approached El Capitan of Texas and the highest points deep in the heart of

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, I witnessed and recorded an entirely unique view of this corner of the oversized state, and carried away a distinctly altered view of the city with which I often associated unhappiness as a child.  And when I returned to the border city forty-eight hours later, the smoke still rose on the horizon beyond the Big River.  Perhaps some things linger longer than they ought.