Road Trips and Potato Chips

Back in my day, there were only two major brands of potato chips -- the "nobody can eat just one" Lays brand, and the "ruffles have ridges" Ruffles brand.  When Pringles came out with their processed and pressed version, it was almost as revolutionary as sliced bread.  Somewhere along in there barbecue flavor became a big hit.  Today, I feel spoiled by all sorts of brands and flavors -- I can enjoy dirty chips, terra chips, baked  Lays, and yes, of course, lime-flavored tortilla chips. I thought I had seen and probably  all of the flavors known to man and to 13-year old boys (Dash made me try a pizza-flavored Pringles chip a few weeks ago.)  Then we took a road trip, and a whole new world opened up.

Our road trip started off relatively well -- we flew to Las Vegas and spent a couple of days swimming in bathtub temperature pools and basking in the "dry heat" of August in the southwest.  We left "sin city" to spend a couple of days with family before launching our 5-day trip through Utah and Colorado.

Our first stop was a in Beaver, Utah, an hour north of Cedar, so we could pick up some squeaky cheese for our trip. (For a look at how it's made, here's a link on DFA Cache Valley Squeaky Cheese on YouTube.)  Little did we know that this would be our last "big city" stop for a few days.

It's almost a five hour drive from Cedar City to Moab, where we would stay for a few days.  It was hot, so we had lots of bottled water in the car, which also necessitated many stops along the way.  At our first gas and convenience store stop, we found dill pickle-flavored potato chips -- thumbs up all around.  Dash remembered that a couple of years ago we did a root beer tasting tour (and subsequent blog) so he promptly declared a potato chip tasting trip.  

We stopped at the next gas/convenience station somewhere along the route -- the only thing I remember was a billboard that said "No Bull! This is the last service for 120 miles!"  We did the math (the local speed limit fluctuated between 75 and 80 mph) and figured that we would be in the car for about 90 minutes. We didn't really know what "service" would await us on the other end, so we stopped for more bottles of cold water, and more potato chips.  "Limon" was the next flavor -- it got a rounding thumbs down from everyone. I think we were expecting something similar to lime tortilla chips, and this didn't cut it.

I won't bore you, dear reader, with the details on the various gas/convenience stations we found along the way, but other chip flavors we tried included BLT (pretty good), "chaos" (which I mistakenly thought was some exotic flavor and asked Glen what CHowse was -- it turned out to be a combination of about 10 flavors, and I passed on trying it). We skipped the "jalapeño" flavor because no one wanted anything that spicy without some guarantee of gallons of water along the way.

Dash still thinks pizza flavored chips are the best. I prefer my dill pickles the old fashioned way.  Glen had no opinion either way, and Kate wished we had bought more bags of squeaky cheese. And nobody ate just one.

Marcia