Now that I’ve wrapped up my “Hit the Road Hungry” road trip from Vancouver to Los Angeles, I wanted to share more details about the car service I used and recap the highlights of the trip.

Hitting the road with Hit The Road: How it works
To arrange the car that I drove to Los Angeles, I worked with a Toronto-based company, Hit The Road, that pairs people who want to take road trips with people who need their cars moved.

Their trips fall into two categories: travel between Canada and the United States and travel within Canada.

They frequently match drivers with “snowbirds”—Canadians who winter in the southern or western United States. Many “snowbirds” need their cars transported between major Canadian cities and destinations like Florida, Arizona, or southern California. Many of these trips are southbound in the fall or early winter and northbound in March, April, and May.

Hit The Road also offers cross-Canada trips: Toronto-Vancouver, Halifax-Calgary, Montreal-Edmonton, or other long-distance journeys. Most of these cross-Canada trips are in the spring, summer, or fall.

Trips can crop up at other times, too. For my trip from Vancouver to Los Angeles in April, I drove a car for a family who was relocating from British Columbia to California. You can check the list of available cars (and where they’re going) on the Hit the Road website, which is updated regularly.

What it costs
Hit the Road pays drivers a stipend to cover gas and some of your travel costs. While the stipend varies depending on the car, destination, and other factors, for a five-day Vancouver-to-Los-Angeles trip like mine, the standard stipend is about $500, or roughly $100 per day.

You won’t be staying at the Ritz, but if you consider accommodation options like AirBnB, couchsurfing, hostels, budget hotels, camping, or bunking with friends along the way, the stipend should cover the majority of your expenses.

Because all trips are one-way, you also need to budget for airfare, train tickets, or bus travel for your return trip if you’re heading back to your starting point. Still, you’re saving money on transportation, since you’re not paying for round-trip travel.

HitTheRoad.ca has a detailed FAQ for prospective drivers that explains how to apply and how to arrange a trip.

What I liked about driving with Hit The Road

• The price is right: You essentially get a free one-way road trip.


• The process is straightforward: Once you agree on a trip, Hit The Road handles the paperwork (which, in my case, included documents for bringing the car across the U.S.-Canadian border).


• It was fun! And there was lots of good eating along the way.

A couple of cautions

• Your trip has a time limit: Because the car owners (understandably) need their vehicles as soon as possible, you need to keep your road trip to a fairly tight schedule. While five days was enough time for me to make it from Vancouver to Los Angeles by myself without feeling like I had to spend 12 hours a day behind the wheel, it would have been nice to have more time to stop and explore along the way.


• Dealing with the car owner can have its downsides: Hit The Road makes the arrangements, but the driver needs to work out the details of picking up and dropping off the car directly with the owner. In my case, once I delivered the car, the owner balked at giving me a ride to the nearby metro station (which was part of the Hit The Road deal). Although she eventually agreed, the delay meant that I missed my train onward to my next stop and spent three extra hours in LA’s Union Station. A big deal? No. An inconvenience? Yes.

“Hit the Road Hungry” Road Trip Highlights

Would I do a Hit The Road trip again? Definitely. Overall, my trip from Vancouver to Los Angeles was awesome!

Here’s a recap of some of my adventures:

Most unexpected treat: Wine cupcakes, Los Olivos, CA

Best place to spend a sunny afternoon: La Bicyclette, Carmel, CA

Most deliciousness on two wheels: Bites By Bike foodie cycle tour, Portland, OR

Most fun farmers’ market: Thursday night Farmers’ Market, San Luis Obispo, CA

Most interesting discovery: Cold-brewed coffee, Portland, OR

Worst karma: An encounter with the California Highway Patrol at a Buddhist monastery, Ukiah, CA

Best meal overall: Pok Pok, Portland, OR

It took me five days to drive the 2500 kilometers (1500 miles) from Vancouver to Los Angeles. I flew the same distance home in less than three hours.

Of course, we don’t always have time to meander along the coast, searching for tacos, biscuits and gravy, or a Buddhist vegetarian lunch.

But wouldn’t it be nice if we did?

About WanderFood Wednesday
Every Wednesday, you can share a photo or post about own food adventures as part of the WanderFood Wednesday blog carnival. Here’s how:

1. Post a food photo on your site.


2. Add a brief description about the photo—or a longer food-focused post—and include a link to WanderFood Wednesday.


3. Add your blog name and post title to the “Mr. Linky” form below, with a link directly to your post (not to your main blog). That’s it!

Tasty Travels!

Carolyn

Ask a local. That’s always the best way to get the inside story about a place you’re visiting. And when that local also happens to be a travel writer, all the better…

As I’m road-tripping down the California coast, a fellow travel writer—Indie Traveler Sara Benson—tips me off to the San Luis Obispo Farmers’ Market that runs every Thursday evening year-round. I love wandering through markets, but I’m surprised when Sara and I wander onto Higuera Street and find a full-blown, music-fueled street party in progress.

Alongside the stalls brimming with giant artichokes, fresh strawberries, ruby beets, and oranges large and small, are honey makers and nut vendors, student farmers and grizzled field hands, one group preaching evangelical salvation and another promoting the virtues of atheism.

It seems like nearly everyone who lives is this central California city of 45,000 has come out for farmers’ market night.

And it’s not just for the berries and beets. An entire section of the market is devoted to street food!

We weave through the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds toward the aroma of grilling meat. Sara tells me that the market’s “signature dish” is a barbecued tri-trip (steak) sandwich. Alas, one vendor is already sold out and the other two have multi-block-long line-ups.

As I’m weighing up whether to brave the lines—how badly do I need to try the barbecue?—I spy a tamale vendor.

Chile verde tamales? Sold!

I’m glad I asked a local and found this farmers’ market party!

Many thanks to Sara Benson for her California travel tips! And if you’re heading for Las Vegas, she’s the gal to know: she’s the author of the best-selling Viva Las Vegas, Baby! travel app.

Got your own travel tips to share? Every Wednesday, you can share a photo or post about own food adventures as part of the WanderFood Wednesday blog carnival. Here’s how:

1. Post a food photo on your site.


2. Add a brief description about the photo—or a longer food-focused post—and include a link to WanderFood Wednesday.


3. Add your blog name and post title to the “Mr. Linky” form below, with a link directly to your post (not to your main blog). That’s it!

About the “Hit the Road Hungry” Road Trip
I’m doing a solo road trip from Vancouver to Los Angeles, working with a company called Hit The Road that pairs people who want to take road trips with people who need their cars moved. I’m delivering a forest green 1998 Honda Civic for its owners who are moving from British Columbia to southern California, and I’m eating my way down the west coast.

The previous posts in this series are:
When Plans for Pie Go Awry
Taco Craving
Pok Pok in Portland
Living The Serious Coffee Lifestyle in Portland
Bites By Bike, with Portland’s Pedal Bike Tours
Taste of Korea: A Taste of the Food Cart Scene in Portland
I Should Have Had the Deep-Fried Pickles
Winding Through the Redwood Forest
Ten Thousand Buddhas, One Highway Patrolman, But No Lunch
Time for Biscuits and Gravy!
California Cuisine at La Bicyclette in Carmel

I hope you’ll continue to follow along as I “Hit the Road Hungry!”

Tasty Travels!

Carolyn

Stephanie Yuen holds up a square of wiry, black moss. It looks like a sponge that tumbled into a tub of jet-black paint.

Our group of eight is in the Guohua Herbalist Shop on Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Yuen, a food writer and Chinese food expert (her website is called Beyond Chopsticks), is leading us on a Chinatown foodie tour, organized by local culinary experiences company, Edible Canada. She’s taking us through the crowded neighborhood streets, introducing us to all manner of foods, herbs, and Chinese products, while dispensing culinary tips—and samples—along the way.

Blasts of steam swirl around us as we squeeze into the kitchen of the Sun Fresh Bakery on Keefer Street, where apron-clad counter staff press past us carrying tray after tray of pastries, from baked pumpkin pancakes to sesame-coated fried dough to steamed sponge cakes.

Fingers flying, arms wrapped wrist-to-elbow in cotton sleeve protectors, the two bun makers are rolling, pinching, and squeezing mounds of glossy white dough, stuffing them with gooey-looking spoonfuls of pork.

Yuen brings us big puffy steamed vegetable buns to taste. Filled with greens, they’re pillowy soft outside but still slightly crisp within. I’ve sampled similar steamed buns before, but hot from the steamers, these are among the freshest I’ve tried.

“Take a deep breath,” says Yuen, as we crowd into another brightly lit Chinatown shop. “What you’re smelling is some of the best stuff on earth.”

No, we haven’t taken a detour into a storefront selling the famous “BC bud.” We’re in the Ten Ren Tea shop, and what Yuen wants us to sniff is the earthy aroma of ginseng.

We sip mild, grassy ginseng tea, while Yuen extols the health benefits of the ginseng root, which is also commonly used in a Chinese “long-boiled” chicken soup. According to traditional Chinese medicine, Yuen explains, “ginseng will improve your immune system. We also believe that it will re-energize you.”

There’s no lack of energy in the bustling Chinatown Supermarket, where we wedge between the rows of fruits and vegetables, the aisles packed with shoppers preparing for the Chinese New Year.

The reds and oranges we’re seeing around Chinatown, from red banners to piles of fruit, are good luck colors, Yuen explains, signaling prosperity for the New Year. Oranges are particularly popular for the New Year’s holiday, because their seeds represent growth.

Yuen holds up an unfamiliar brown root. It’s a fresh bamboo shoot, nothing like the limp canned slices. Yuen advises slicing and quickly stir-frying it.

She gives us a quick primer on other vegetables. Daikon (used to make Korean kimchee and other pickles). Chinese celery (similar to, but more pungent than, the western variety). Taro (try slicing it and frying it like potato chips, she suggests). Kabocha squash (also called Japanese pumpkin, often used to make a dessert soup with a striking orange color).

Yuen identifies another nobby, brownish root as arrowroot. “You give it to newlyweds, so they’ll have a boy,” she smiles, noting a protuberance on the root that’s shaped something like “a little boy’s little thing.”

“Does anyone know what this is?” Yuen asks, gesturing toward a massive green-skinned vegetable. It looks like a zucchini left way too long in the garden, but it’s actually a winter melon, commonly added to soups.

We learn a sweeter use for winter melon when we stop into Maxim’s Bakery, where we sample a “wife cake.” Yuen recounts a legend about this oddly-named pastry, which has a custard-like interior inside a flaky baked crust.

Apparently, a Chinese chef kept making pastries, trying to decide which to offer in his shop. Tasting each one, his wife rejected one creation after another. Finally, he made her a winter melon cake, which she declared was delicious. The chef dubbed it “my wife’s cake,” exclaiming, “If she approves it, it will sell!”

Hanging in the window at the Dollar Meat Shop is a whole, roast pig, alongside chickens, ribs, sausages, and two kinds of ducks. Yuen calls one variety a “pipa duck,” because its flattened, oblong shape resembles the Chinese stringed instrument known as the pipa.

“The Chinese handle meat the same as Italians do,” Yuen notes, pointing to the sausages and cured hams dangling from the ceiling of the Pender Street shop. She suggests cooking a small amount of salty Chinese ham with rice, and in an east-west twist, slicing Chinese sausage into strips and adding them with lettuce and other vegetables to a wrap.

We can’t talk about meat without trying some, so Yuen brings out samples of the sausages—tasting faintly of lemon—and of the excellent barbecued ribs, sauced in a sweet-smoky marinade. I’d come back for those ribs in a second.

Back at the herbalist shop, Yuen holds a sponge-like substance, labeled “fungus,” and surprises us by suggesting that it makes an excellent dessert. Soak it in water, she says, then steam it, add canned fruits, and drizzle with chocolate. It sounds weird enough that it might even be good!

Yuen leads us around the shop, pointing out various products, from dried scallops (“a delicacy”) to birds’ nests, while we munch on sweet dried plums and another dried fruit called longan, or “dragon’s eye.” Similar to a plum, but with a smokier flavor, longan is used in soups, teas, and desserts.

As she waves what looks like a flattened lizard on a stick (it turns out to be a dried gecko), Yuen tells us more about traditional Chinese medicine, explaining how different herbs, roots, and even dried creatures are used to regulate the body’s humors and treat various conditions. “Western doctors cure the symptoms. Chinese doctors go right to the root of things,” she says. She cautioned us to consult a trained practitioner, rather than trying to give ourselves an herbal cure, although I don’t think any of us were planning to sample the gecko unsupervised…

Remember the hairy black square that Yuen was holding?

It’s called “hairy moss,” and it’s a crucial ingredient in Chinese New Year dishes, from vegetable hot pots to braised pork hocks. Its Chinese name—fa cai in Mandarin or fat choy in Cantonese—is a homonym for the words “to get rich,” the same expression that the Chinese use to wish each other a happy new year: Gong Xi Fa Cai! Gong Hay Fat Choy!

Our tasty tour wrapped up with a dim sum lunch. I’ll share the delicious details in my next post—stay tuned!

If you go…
Edible Canada offers tours of Chinatown most Saturdays, departing from the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Classical Chinese Garden. You can choose from a two-hour neighborhood tour ($40) or a tour plus a dim sum lunch ($65). For the next two Saturdays (January 28 and February 4, 2012), during the Dine Out Vancouver festival, you can take the basic Chinatown tour for only $30. A great deal! Reservations are required; book on the Edible Canada website.

Do you have a food post to share with WanderFood readers? Join the WanderFood Wednesday blog carnival! Here’s all you do:

1) Add a food-related post—a recipe, food photo, or any other foodie find—to your site, and include a link to WanderFood Wednesday.
2) Add your blog name and the title of your food post to the “Mr. Linky” form below, with a link directly to your food post (not to your main blog).

Tasty Travels!

Carolyn

Thanks to Edible Canada and Tourism Vancouver for arranging my Chinatown tour.