Donuts, Diners and Driving 1500 Miles To Fargo, North Dakota

We go a little bit crazy with our road trips. We bought a new car in December 2016 and have already put 88,000 miles on it! Even crazier, I don’t drive, so Scott has driven the entire 88,000 miles all by himself.

Last week, we spent six days on a road trip from New York City to Fargo, ND for the Fargo marathon (Scott’s 16^th state in his quest to run marathons in all 50 states). Total round trip was 3111 miles!

Five of the six days were actually on the road. We spent Wednesday to Friday driving by way of Canada and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Saturday was the marathon day, so no driving for Scott, just running 26.2 miles in the cold, wet Fargo weather.

Then Sunday and Monday we returned to New York City by way of the Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago, and then the back roads of Indiana and Ohio. All-in-all, we covered 10 states and Ontario in Canada.

Time To Eat The Donuts

We love donuts as much as we love driving.

One of our first stops on the road was for Paula’s Donuts in Buffalo. Scott discovered Paula’s last year while touring colleges with our youngest, and we now stop there on every trip to or through Buffalo. The donuts are enormous, fluffy and come in many varieties. The filled donuts are my favorite – I had the Bavarian cream on an earlier trip and picked the angel cream this time around (the chocolate variety so extra sweet!). There are lots of peanut and peanut butter varieties, and Scott went for one of those.

Later in the trip, we made a stop at Pat’s Donuts and Kreme near Lima, OH. We had the apple fritter, maple iced vanilla cream, and the “star” which is essentially a star-shaped glazed donut with a bit of chocolate glazed donut in the center. Like Paula’s, the donuts at Pat’s are enormous and delicious. Now that our youngest is entering college in OH this fall, we’ll have more occasions to detour to Pat’s Donuts.

I guess because we were so excited by the donuts, we forgot to take photos of them! So you’ll have to take our word for it.

We love diners as much as we love donuts

Rivaling our fondness for donuts is our preference for diners and any restaurant that serves comfort food. Our first meal stop was in Bath, NY for Stephanie’s Family Restaurant.

Dinner was in Canada at The Burger’s Priest, a fast casual chain in Canada (so it felt original to us!). The burgers were tasty, and the menu was hilarious. I was too full from our earlier donut run to have dessert here, but they offer the Vatican On Ice, which is an ice cream sandwich between grilled cheese sandwiches.

We ate at our hotel during our stopover the second night in Marquette, Michigan, but it wasn’t just your same old hotel restaurant. We stayed at The Landmark Inn, which had several dining options, including a pub with a view of Lake Superior and the Michigan skyline. The food rivaled the view – tasty pizza and pasta Bolognese.

Another highlight was coming across Higher Grounds Coffee Shoppe in Remer, MN. Notice their slogan in the sign below. They had several food options available and given all the eating we had been doing, we shared a great chicken wrap with chips.

Remer is known as the home of Bigfoot, but otherwise it is a tiny town with not much happening. Higher Grounds emerges like an oasis out of nowhere with a cute café environment that looks like it belongs in a more vibrant neighborhood. The back of the store has a lending library of inspirational books (think Joel Osteen). Had I known I would have brought one of my many personal development books to trade.

In Fargo, we didn’t go out much as Scott was focused on his race. However, dinner after the marathon was a big treat as we both love barbecue, and No Bull Smokehouse in downtown Fargo did not disappoint. We ordered a variety of meats and loved everything – the brisket, sausage, ribs and pulled pork. We sampled all 4 barbecue sauces, with sweet being our favorite and spicy tasting good but distractedly too much like papadum, the crispy Indian bread I normally love, but not with my BBQ!

For dessert, we went to Nichole’s Fine Pastry and Café, which was a recommendation from a friendly local that we met. At Nichole’s, we had snickerdoodle cookies, vanilla bean cake with buttercream frosting, and hot chocolates with the thickest, creamiest layer of whipped cream I have ever had on a hot drink. It was like getting a bonus dessert floating on our drinks!

On the road trip back to New York City, the highlight (other than Pat’s Donuts in Lima) was brunch at Machine Shed, near Minneapolis. Their cinnamon roll is apparently an award-winner, and hopefully you can see why from the picture below.

The cinnamon roll seems equivalent to half a loaf of bread! I didn’t really have room for it after the eggs, made-from-scratch corned beef hash, cheesy hash browns, and a pancake the size of a steering wheel, but I made some room given how delicious the cinnamon roll was. The menu also advertised a pecan roll, which I will have to order next time just to see how much more delicious a breakfast sweet can be.

Our final meal on the road was fittingly at Dutch Pantry Family Restaurant, just off Rt 80 in western PA, and it is one of our road trip favorites. We normally get their apple fritters (they’re like zepoles, only crispier and apple-flavored). But we were so full by that point in the trip that we just had our comfort food entrees – meatloaf for me and their special sandwich, The Big Dutch (like a BLT and ham and cheese in one), for Scott.

The nature was even more glorious than the food

As much as we loved eating our way across 10 states, the sites and scenery were the best part. On the trip out, we stopped off at Niagara Falls on the United States side. I prefer the US side, as it has less of a carnival atmosphere than the Canada side. You could appreciate how majestic the Falls are. It was a bit rainy that day but there was enough of a break in the rain for us to walk out to the falls and take a few photos before the rains returned and chased us back to the car.

On this trip, we drove along ALL of the Great Lakes.

• In Buffalo we drove past Lake Erie
• Then drove around Lake Ontario as we approached the Toronto area.
• Then we drove around Lake Huron as made out way to Sault St Marie to cross back into the US.
• Then we encountered Lake Superior, which seemed to last forever, and as the largest of the Great Lakes, it is literally superior.
• To round out the lakes, on the way home, we drove down Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Chicago!

With long drives each day, we usually started out pretty early, and we were rewarded with an amazing looking full moon as we headed out from Marquette MI on our third day.

This was a fantastic road trip, and we can’t wait to do it again when we can spend more time at each stop.