Potlatch restaurant guide

Here we go: it's my restaurant guide for this year's Potlatch. What it is, is a cut-down, streamlined, reorganized, and most importantly updated version of the one from two years ago. Having re-centered the coverage on our new location, and limited it to a small radius because this is just a one-day con, I checked everything for ensuring it's still there and to update the hours, and then over the last three weeks tried out most of the new places.

A one-afternoon event may not really need a restaurant guide, but I'm hoping that having this up seven weeks before the con will whet your appetites and encourage you to attend.

Foreign climes

One on my list (f'locked) has listed every foreign country she's visited, by year. I thought, I should do that. But instead of foreign countries, I'm listing overseas, i.e. out of North America or immediately adjacent islands. Because I've been to Canada quite often (and Mexico a few times too), and I can't remember all of exactly when, but this way I can stick in Hawaii, which though part of the U.S. is definitely overseas. I'm separating out the nations of the U.K., as well.

It's not a long list, and goes like this:

1976+	Hawaii
1979	England, Wales
1992	England, Scotland, Netherlands, Germany
1995*	England, Wales
1998	England, Wales
2000*	Hawaii
2001*	England, Wales
2002*	(France), Italy, Vatican
2005+	England

Asterisks are trips I took with B, crosses are ones I took with my mother (and, in the first case, much of the rest of my family). France is in brackets because, though I went through customs and was thus legally as well as physically in France, all I did there was cross from one side of De Gaulle Airport to the other, which doesn't really count. On the other hand, in parts of only two days in the Vatican, I explored it more thoroughly than any other country I've been in.

I'd like to go back to some of these places, but I have no compelling need to do so right now. There are some other places I'd like to go to, but not enough to make it worth the trouble. Some are particularly iffy. I'm not going to Israel until they straighten things out over there, so it's probably not going to happen. I'm rather attracted by Australia and New Zealand, but I am far more strongly disattracted by the intervening distance. Most of your more romantic or tingly tourist destinations are either a little too exotic for my conservative tastes, or else - as I'd like to tell the people who've set their phone robot to keep offering me a free cruise to the Bahamas - too boring. (I can't think of anything to do in the Bahamas that could possibly interest me enough to make even a free trip worth the trouble.) Most of my faunching for travel is here on my own continent.