It’s amaz­ing, isn’t it, to think about how rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent road trips are with the addi­tion of a GPS unit and a iPhone? With help from Yelp, the Chowhound boards, and occa­sion­ally Road Food, it’s hard to find any­thing but an awe­some meal. I would have been a ter­ri­ble pioneer.

This has become the trip where I fell in love with grits. I think through­out the South I was man­ag­ing to get a serv­ing of grits once a day. Break­fast grits? Love them. Sat­ur­day morning’s grits came from one of Val­o­rie and Alberto’s local joints, and didn’t dis­ap­point. We ran into Perch to say farewell to the host­ess to the most­ess and I fell in a love with a Stray Dog Designs lamp (this one, if I remem­ber cor­rectly) which I may have tried to sneak into the car if it had not been a wee bit out of my price range.

Lunch was in Breaux Bridge. We stopped at Poche’s Mar­ket, per­haps deter­mined to con­tinue our down­ward spi­ral. We ate some green beans, for what it’s worth. (Let’s not dis­cuss that they were on the side of a pork stew and some craw­fish etouf­feé, OK?)

We rolled into Hous­ton just in time for din­ner with Ryan’s col­lege friends (their wed­ding was the first one we attended as a cou­ple!). They have two adorable daugh­ters and busy sched­ules so we picked up din­ner from Taco Cabana, which, if those existed near my house, I think I would turn into a taco myself.

Still in Hous­ton, we stayed in the world’s most unfor­tu­nate La Quinta. Our room smelled of some­thing so ter­ri­ble we could not name it. Wet horse? When Ryan men­tioned it Sun­day morn­ing at check­out, the per­son at the front desk said, “Well, what did it smell like?”

The answer: not any­thing I want to ever smell again.