Before we left for vacation, Steve and I made an oath that we would not go into a McDonald's once. It wouldn't be a problem for the days that we stayed at my in-laws, but this trip involved days and days of driving and overnight stays in three different towns. Could we do it?
As it turns out, we failed. I think we went to a McDonald's on Day 2 of the never-ending drive. But then we were very good, until the last lunch before we headed back home and we just needed something to put in the kids' bellies fast.
Avoiding Mickey D's is hard, because there are so few options along the side of the highway. If we pulled off the highway and ended up in a middle class town, there were more choices. We used TripAdvisor and our GPS to find McDonald alternatives. But we couldn't plan these things. We pulled over when people needed to pee, so decisions have to be made on the spot.
We kept a control on costs by splitting entrees. One time, the four of us split a full rack of ribs, fresh cold slaw, beans, and corn bread for $23. That's how much a meal for four costs at McDonald's.
Even health choices at McDonald's suck. Their grilled chicken sandwich is more tortilla than grilled meat. Salads smell stale. You're best off just getting the Big Mac and an unsweetened ice tea.
People sure must eat a lot of Big Macs down South, because it was hard to avoid noticing the expanded waist-lines in the cotton t-shirt/capri/large purse uniform. Of course, people in my town are gym freaks, but the differences were stark.
It's funny how you notice new things about your home when you return from a break. When we walked in the door, I noticed a weird damp smell coming from our fireplace. It must have had that smell before we left, but I never picked it up. The huge, shady oak trees that surround our house looked extra huge and extra shady. I also checked out the over-worked out women in town walking briskly to lunch and laughed. Ladies, three hours at the gym is a little loopy.
I still have that lazy vacation feeling and so don't feel pressed to tie all the random thoughts in this essay together. That warm feeling is also keeping me immune to the news that the neighbor's stream jumped its banks and eroded two feet of our yard.
Apt. 11d 
I road trip all the time without McDonalds… or Burger King or Taco Bell. The trick is to check the tourist and town sites for the area you’ll be driving through on any given day in advance, then plot out the options. Yes, every where you go there will be fast food, but there will often be good food as well. And if all else fails, stop in a grocery for lean sliced turkey breast or prepared salads.
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My family has switched over to Wendy’s for its fast food needs. I don’t eat any of that stuff generally, mainly because I dislike meat. When we road-trip, I look for diners, Friendly’s and Denny’s.
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I always eat at McDonald’s when I travel. I do like Wendy’s better, but they closed the one by my office.
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We use Yelp to find the Subways (which we don’t have a problem finding) and the Panera’s (which are more rare). We pack healthy food for snacks and stretch out meals until we get to someplace decent and make bathroom trips at gas stations if we have to stop for that. Given that we’re vegetarians, we’ve actually never done any of the typical fast foods for road trip stops, anyway.
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Laura’s right, though, that travelling on the beach roads between say Ocean City, MD and Wilmington, NC means slim pickings for decent food. Even the last trip we made to Florida was tough. One night we drove for what seemed like an hour out to what seemed like the middle of an airstrip in Sarasota just to find a Friendly’s.
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We usually do subway since geeky boy will eat tuna but no beef or chicken. Mr. Geeky often craves a cheeseburger, so we will sometimes hit a mcds. We also often do cracker barrel, especially for late breakfast.
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McDonald’s isn’t that terrible once in a blue moon, but my quick service preferences would be McAlister’s Deli (they’re not in the NE, but they have good coverage elsewhere), Panera’s, Rosa’s Cafe and Tortilla Factory (lots of Texas locations, plus one in CA), California Tortilla (excellent burrito place–locations in the Mid-Atlantic, plus Pennsylvania), Pei Wei and Chipotle’s. I feel like there are a lot more good quick service chains than there have ever been. There are tolerable chain restaurants (I like IHOP now and then), but a lot of them seem very expensive for what you’re getting. Starbucks has some good (if expensive) sandwiches, and I really like some of their cheese-and-fruit tray selections–very good for kids.
By the way, beware the fruit cup. My sister has a cafe, and she told me that when she visited a restaurant trade show, the latest breakthrough was a fruit cup that stays “fresh” on the shelf for two weeks. I’ve never felt the same about fruit cups since hearing that.
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Down south, you can always find a Wal-mart. We usually drop in there to get fruit, yogurt, stuff for sandwiches. Many Wal-marts also have a subway on the premises. I usually put stuff like paper products in the car first so we’re ready to go.
Laura, I live near OBX and I wonder if the people are actually fatter or if there’s just more exposed skin in our beach communities hence making the fat rolls more noticeable. (Thinking of that scene in “Friends” with the ugly fat naked guy who lives across from them.)
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New Jersey state obesity rate: 23.7%
North Carolina state obesity rate: 29.1%
http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html
New Jersey individuals below the poverty line in 2009: 799K, 9.4%
North Carolina population below the poverty line: 1.478M, 16.3%
Click to access 12s0709.pdf
And if I thought the exercise required documentary evidence, I’d find the regional numbers to point out the difference between the extremely impoverished eastern counties of NC and VA and the extremely wealthy northern suburbs of NJ, but I find the whole “they’re so fat there” conversation almost too insulting to engage.
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Of course, weight is related to wealth. Not just weight, but marriage, mortality rates, even sleep patterns. And there are obvious differences in wealth between Northern NJ suburbs and eastern NC. I said that in this post. It’s bizarre to ignore the fact these differences don’t exist. There’s also a difference in traffic congestion and the height of trees. Not all the differences benefit those here in NJ. I do think that a lot of women here are too consumed with their appearances. I also hinted at that in the post.
One of the cool things about traveling is that when you come home, you see the weirdness and the bad smells and the shady trees in a new light.
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I-95 is a death trap. So many trips between NYC and Providence, and unless you get off I-95 the choice is slim. I don’t consider Subway, Wendy’s or even Panera’s (ok, maybe slightly) any better than McDonald’s. Processed meat is processed meat. We a bit more serious (but not fanatical) about our food choices since teaching Food and Politics. There is a “rest stop food app” for some highways (ask Ms. Steffy), and we seek out “small towns” in CT. When flying we try to bring something or cobble together something. In the NYC area we have great choices at airports, though expensive. That said, leave the NYC metropolitan area and you might want to pull your hair out.
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Processed meat is processed meat.
In terms of taste, that is very much not true.
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And now I want a liverwurst sandwich but I’m not near an actual deli.
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Macaroni, we drive between NY and Providence all the time, and we stop at Ikea whenever possible. It’s halfway for us, and the kids like it. There are also the food trucks off the exit there.
There’s also the Shore Line diner off exit 59. We used to meet a friend at Friendly’s off Exit 19, but that closed. We ended up at a diner further south. The Friendly’s in Mystic is also popular with us when we’re leaving the Providence area in the evening; there’s an Equinox Diner there I’m dying to try but the kids want Friendly’s. Ugh.
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“Processed meat is processed meat.”
‘In terms of taste, that is very much not true.’
Very true. The texture is totally different, too. As a veteran of McDonald’s salads and Chili’s salads, I’m pretty sure that they’re using a completely different grade of chicken than Panera’s uses on their salads. The McDonalds’s and Chili’s chicken is a sort of spongy, rubbery distant relative of tofu.
Panera’s has some very good salads. I’m currently managing gestational diabetes, and I’ve found that ordering a half portion of their avocado cobb salad with double chicken has been a very successful formula. A couple other salads there have also been very good friends to me the past several weeks. (McDonald’s salads work OK, too, purely from the point of view of results, but the rubbery chicken is unpalatable.) My husband notes that Rosa’s Cafe and Tortilla factory uses a surprisingly good grade of chicken in their fajitas.
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Here in the Midwest, we are blessed with Culvers. Haven’t been to a McDonalds for over a decade! Still fast food….but somehow, nicer.
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Oh, and let’s not forget Chik-fil-a. As fast food goes, it’s very good. Their salads are a cut or two above McDonald’s and I love Chik-fil-a’s peppermint milkshakes around Christmas time. They have regular events where if you bring your family dressed up as cows, you can get free food.
https://www.cowappreciationday.com/winners/herds
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I have not lived in a country with a McDonalds since 2007. Before that the nearest McDonalds was 30 miles away and I have never learned to drive. From an International point of view McDonalds are pretty rare. Outside the US, Europe, and the richer or larger countries in Asia they are very hard to find. Moscow has one and they exist in Beijing, but there are none in Kyrgyzstan or Ghana. Even within the US there are huge swaths of rural territory in places like the border region of southern Arizona where they are hard to find.
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When we were in Germany visiting the small town where my ancestors were from, my cousin took us to where the border between East and West Germany was. I was LOL because just over on the West side was a HUGE McDonald’s, probably new since 1989. It’s funny because there’s nothing there except farm land and a road and then BAM, McDonald’s. (Of course, there’s little development right at the border because there are still buried land mines.)
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True story: The McDonald’s on the eastern seaboard look different from those in the midwest. I don’t know why.
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There are lots of McDonalds in Russia, not just in Moscow. (Moscow has lots of them, too.) They are not all over in Russia, but they are in many of the small cities close to Moscow (places that are now sort of like distant suburbs), in St. Petersburg, in Rostov-on-Don, and I’d be quite surprised if they were not in the larger (more than 1 million people) cities such as Novosibirsk. (Google turns them up easily in Nizhny Novgorod and Yekaterinburg.) They are in Mexico and many places in South America. Google does seem to suggest that they are rare in Africa, though suggests they are in South Africa, in Kenya (at least one, though that’s less clear), Egypt, Tunisa, and Morocco.
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And we all know about this, right?
Pizza Hut saved my life in Berlin the first morning there. My body thought it was 1 am, but it was 7 am, but I got pizza anyway at the Hauptbahnhof.
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McDonald’s are getting pretty ubiquitous in China, pretty much any city of 1 million + will have one (population of 1 million is basically considered a town in China), though KFC is much more popular. At this point basically every block in Beijing has a KFC. It’s also a little more expensive than McDonald’s too, which is weird because in my impression KFC definitely seems more downmarket in the US. McD’s has priced itself as a reasonably affordable restaurant in China, like not super cheap, but definitely a place teenager and college students can get a snack and study at after school, or young families can go to. The decor is also pleasant and designed to promote hanging out or study. Their ice cream is legitimately cheap (about 18-20 cents a cone) and delicious (at least comparatively), and they have separate ice cream stalls unattached to restaurants that are extremely popular. Weirdly, Pizza Hut has cornered the upscale market, and sells pizzas for, like, $25-40, and has white table clothes and real silverware and dressed up waitresses.
Speaking of fast food, I heard some Italians describing their first and last trip to Starbucks (in Bangkok), and the look of disgust on their face when they described their cappuccino almost made me LOL. I heard Starbucks is trying to make inroads into Rome, but it’s hard to see how considering that Italian coffee is infinitely better and cheaper.
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There’s a place called Magic Burger in Vladivostok (or at least there was recently).
http://www.waytorussia.net/FarEast/Vladivostok/EatingOut.html
I’ve never eaten there, but I seem to remember hearing that their cheeseburger contained no beef patty at all, just cheese. On a similar note, my husband emigrated from Poland in the early 80s right around the time that the street vendors’ hot dog buns no longer contained a hot dog.
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In Soviet Russia, fast food is for fasting.
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They are very rare in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan has none and I am pretty sure there are none in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, or even Uzbekistan.
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Upon checking not only does Middle Asia proper have no Mcdonalds, but Kazakhstan also has no McDonalds. Nor apparently do Afghanistan or Mongolia making Greater Central Asia even more McDonalds free than Africa. The fact that there a few in Russia does not change this fact. A lot of South East Asia has no McDonalds either. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Burma all appear McDonalds free.
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