![Toronto, Canada [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/toronto13-330x220.jpg)
It was tough to sleep on the red-eye from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Toronto, Ontario. When I initially booked my tickets from Portland, Oregon, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the cheapest route put me through Canada, which I certainly didn’t mind. A short jump to Vancouver, a red-eye flight, and a day to play in Toronto before I boarded for Brazil.
![Boise and Snake River Valley [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/grapes-e1550563835930-330x220.jpg)
Aside from your relationship with potatoes, you hadn’t really crossed my mind over the years, your state little more than a hostage to the French fry existence. As it turns out, there’s more to you, with over 180 agricultural products, a top producer of Austrian winter peas, trout, barley, sugarbeets – and yes, potatoes. You also have a serious relationship with wine. Who knew?
![Hedges Family Estate [DAILYBLENDER.COM]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/tricities7-330x220.jpg)
My knowledge of the Tri-Cities area had been somewhere between the Hanford Site and the Kennewick Man over the last fifteen years of my Northwest residence. It seemed a flat, uninteresting corridor in the lower middle of Washington state with nothing but space to offer, overshadowed by the evergreen of Seattle further west.
There wasn’t much English being tossed around on my flight from Canada to Brazil. Throughout the nearly-eleven-hour trip, I heard Portuguese, Spanish, French, German – but very few words I understood.
Piling into a crowded, frenzied amusement park is generally the last on my list of trips to take, but as a parent, it is inevitably a moment that arrives at some point, the pulling of ones heartstrings, t-shirt, and wallet until tickets are purchased, hotels are booked, and comfortable shoes are packed.
Chef Michael Symon seems like the kind of friend you’re excited to see when you run into when you see each other on the street. A smile on his face, a spring in his step, he is a regular on television and at food and wine festivals across the country, always jovial, always within reach.
Simon Van Booy has a way with words. A way with people, really. An observation of life that builds on a page like the slow, calculated movements of new building constructs.
I hadn’t seen the Southern Cross in nearly twenty years. Back then, I was a junior in college, studying abroad for a semester along the southern coast of Australia, thousands of miles away from family and friends.
![Agritopia's Joe Johnston [dailyblender.com]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/joesq-330x220.jpg)
Developed in the early 2000s, after a string of successful coffee shops made Joe Johnston a local celebrity of sorts, it is an oasis in the desert, an agricultural Utopia. A working farmland sits at the heart of the property, with Joe’s Farm Grill, a small Farmer’s Market, and a coffee shop (packed with yoga Moms and strollers at 11 am) perched on one side.
![Tucson, Arizona [DAILYBLENDER.COM]](https://dailyblender.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ariz_sq-e1544907436562-330x220.jpg)
There is something magical to the end of a year. It’s as if we’re given the opportunity for a do-over, to do away with another twelve months that may or may not have served its purpose.
As a Midwest kid who grew up in a faith-heavy community, it almost felt a little sacrilege to read Christopher Moore’s Lamb. The story of Jesus’s teen years as told by his best friend, Biff, Lamb spins the story of the Messiah’s early life, before the healing and the leading and the fishes and the whatnot.