got back last Wednesday night, all tears and thousand-yard stare.
"What are you going to do next?" everyone asks, except all I want to do is sleep in a bed and, I don't know, stumble into a hefty inheritance. Now I've had some shut eye, and I have clean clothes, and I'm speaking in complete sentences, so it's time. Time for a little something I like to call ... AWARDS! (The Completely Incomplete, Off-the-Top-of-My-Head List)
I love awards. Don't you?

Best Regional Food
New York Pizza (New York City, New York)
Better than Maine lobster, better than Baltimore crabs, better than Philly cheesesteaks, better than New Orleans' gumbo. This is the absolutest bestified stuff in the world and it doesn't taste the same anywhere else.

Best Regional Breakfast
The breakfast taco (Austin, Texas)
Cheap, simple, and profoundly delicious. Why the rest of the country hasn't caught on is a question to riddle the Sphinx. Oh I hear you, Los Angelinos, "We have the breakfast burrito." Not the same, my friends, not the same at all.

Best Coffeehouse
Stumptown Coffee (Portland, Oregon)
Fresh, French-pressed gourmet coffee for a dollar. A dollar. So reasonable!

Most Rewarding Tourist Attraction
TIE: The House on the Rock (Spring Green, Wisconsin) / Musee Mecanique (San Francisco, California)
The first is a two-mile-long, jaw-dropping collection of curiosities in the home of an eccentric millionaire; the second is a collection of coin-operated machines culled from old amusement parks (and it is, sadly, now closed).

Least Rewarding Tourist Attraction
The World's Only Corn Palace (Mitchell, South Dakota)
Can you believe there's only one?

Best Camping
British Columbia and The Yukon
Totally splendid and filled with curious, nonthreatening wildlife. Safe and remote while being near the highway. Sometimes, the sites are even free. (Free!)

Worst Camping
KOA Kampgrounds
This nationwide chain, catering to RVs and those of us charmed by the needless misspelling of basic English words, actually tried to charge me $18 to pitch a tent in their parking lot during a packed July 4 weekend in Bar Harbor, Maine. Two words: K-Fuck K-You.

Best National Park
Yellowstone National Park (Wyoming)
Glacier and Arcadia are fine (and, I hear, much less crowded on average), but what can I say? I had a blast at Yellowstone. A buffalo wandered through the parking lot and it was snowing that day, and hell, I'm just a sucker for bubbling pots of mud.

Worst National Park
Mount Rushmore (South Dakota)
Because it's just so silly.

Best Highway
The Pacific Coast Highway (California)
Ocean and mountains and redwoods smashed up against each other. Perfect rolled-down windows weather.

Worst Highway
The New Jersey Turnpike (New Jersey to DC)
Because they don't just make you drive it. They make you pay.

Best City to Drive In
Portland, Oregon
Some people complain that the city's obsessively numbered and alphabetized streets are creepy and prefab; for a tourist, they're freaking brilliant.

Worst City to Drive In
Washington DC
"Don't block the box" a sign at every intersection warns. Okay. Whatever THAT means. Riddled with traffic circles designed for horse and buggies and boasting a grid system clearly constructed by glue-sniffing toddlers, our nation's capital has a tangle of streets just as labrynthine, and frustrating, as our government.

Best Hotel
The Madonna Inn (San Luis Obispo, California)
Over 100 themed rooms like the Caveman Room, with a waterfall shower. I stayed in the intensely pink "Krazy Daizy" room and couldn't have been more giddy. The name has no relation to the pop singer, although Madonna did pay homage to the place on her last album by borrowing the hotel's Western-motif sign to place on the cover.

Best Library
Athens, Georgia
Because they let me use the Internet for two hours at a time. And when I finished, they let me use it for another two hours. And they were nice, and left me alone, and for that, I will always love them.

Best Car
My car.

Best Trip
My trip

Best Friends
My friends

Best Way to Thank You
Thank you thank you