Ken and I had a nice little vacation last week, up near Grass Valley and Nevada City. It’s up in the Gold Country, in the Sierra Foothills northeast of Sacramento, about three hours drive from San Francisco. In the past we’ve enjoyed going up to Placerville; same idea except the towns are bigger and have more to offer up north.

Not that city life is the primary reason to go to Nevada County. It’s quiet up there, and beautiful; a nice escape from the city. Still, nice to have amenities like grocery stores and restaurants. New Moon is good for fine dining and South Pine Cafe is a great casual breakfast / lunch place.

We had a great stay in this log cabin, a bit south of Grass Valley in Alta Sierra. Really comfortable place and big, could easily host 6+ for a week. Nice creek in the back, chirping frogs, wood stove, hot tub, hammocks, and a well furnished kitchen.

Ken and I spent a week in Grass Valley, up in the Sierra Foothills northeast of Sacramento. We're thinking about buying a house up there. Here's where we went. The map is a screenshot from Google Latitude, a passive location tracker. It's a roughly accurate view of where we travelled; the purple circle is where we stayed. The spray of red south and west from there aren't correct, I think it's iPhone location errors in a rural setting.

What strikes Ken and I most is how much better and how many more dining options there are in New York than San Francisco. In SF we like to think of ourselves as foodies, but it's pretty provincial compared to NY.

Les Halles (Financial District). Atavistic French brasserie. Very basic menu, great if you want steak frites and not so much otherwise. Reasonable preparation, nice room, surprisingly inexpensive. I wish I had a place like this in San Francisco.

Dos Toros (Village). A taqueria serving SF-style burritos, in New York! Considered the best burrito option among many SF expats. I thought it was good; honestly as good as most of the places in SF. Nice spicy sauce, good carnitas, good cheese. Too salty, and the staff of four rolled sloppy burritos in twice the time a single person in SF can do. But it was good.

reBar (DUMBO). Didn't eat, just drinks, but liked it. Comfortable place to meet after work, nice beer selection, cool art in the building.

Wolfgang's Steakhouse (Tribeca). Ken wanted a New York steakhouse, this was pretty great. Really amazing quality steak, both the filet and the ribeye, although the portions are comically oversized. Better quality of beef than Ruth's Chris, for what it's worth. Good salads, OK service, kind of noisy room.

Bar Boulud (UWS). Part of Daniel Boulud's empire, the Bar is a more casual cafe kind of place. Serious brunch menu, including very well made omelets (a lost skill in most of the US). Also a lovely charcuterie selection, many delicious meats. Great place for a smart lunch.

Chez Josephine (Hell's Kitchen). 11pm dinner after theater, French, with nice live piano music. And a wonderfully welcome very gay staff. The food was, frankly, mixed quality; both our entrees were fairly dull meat+sauce, but the salads were nice. Really enjoyed the room and the service, though, a nice post-theater meal.

Highpoint (Chelsea). We were in the mood for a boozy brunch in Chelsea, Highpoint was perfect. Great breakfast bar, terrific Bloody Marys and an interesting list of other cocktails. The eggs benedict were nice. The food is quite inexpensive, too, good value.

My first few days in NY have had beautiful weather, so I've done a lot of walking through Manhattan's open spaces. Here's some notes and photos.

Roosevelt Island is this wacky bit of Manhattan borough, an island in the East River. There's not much out there, condos and hospitals. The reason to visit is the open space, nice long walks on both sides of the island and great views of the Upper East Side. Also grass, parks, even barbecue grills for anyone's enjoyment. It will be particularly nice to visit in 2013 when the southern park is fully open. It looks like they are preserving the creepy hospital ruins there as part of the park, a nice touch of gothic drama in an otherwise bucolic place. (Roosevelt Island is also a popular video game setting; several GTA4 missions start at that hospital.) The Tramway is strongly recommended; it's a short ride but the view as you go sailing into midtown between the buildings is terrific.

The High Line is New York's most famous new park, a nicely landscaped mile or two of abandoned railroad track. Having a park up above the city streets makes all the difference, a nice quiet remove. They also did a stunning job on the design with many great places to sit and watch other people. There's too damn many people, actually, and the linear park design makes it hard to get any space. So it's more of a people watching place than an open area.

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions in response to my round 1 post. New Yorkers are opinionated about dining! Thanks in particular to Marc for a list of more casual options near my hotel. I'm really enjoying the density and diversity of restaurants in Manhattan. Haven't done much very fancy in the past few days, but we've got a list of ridiculous plans next week: Craft (again), 11 Madison, Del Posto, Daniel, Blue Hill Farm, Bouley, Mas Farmhouse, Le Bernardin. It's too much, honestly, may need to pare that back.

Shake Shack (Flatiron). World famous burgers for a reason. They are very delicious thanks mostly to the large amounts of fat and salt in the burger. Eat them quick; I imagine in 10 minutes they're disgusting. But on a nice day in Madison Park they're awesome.

Sushi Yasuda (Midtown). Very widely recommended. It was good, but nothing particularly exciting or unusual. Much like the nigiri you can get anywhere, just very high quality. I'm told sometimes you get unusual things like toro from 4 different parts of the world. We got some great toro but it was unidentified. Yasuda has moved back to Japan, I wonder if the current staff is simplifying?

Pegu Club (SoHo). A nice bar with serious cocktails. Great drink list, nice room, silly uncomfortable furniture. I'll go again but sit at the bar.

Emporio (Nolita). Italian picked at the last minute because Torrisi was awkward. Nice place, comfortable and quiet at lunch. The pasta was tasty but a bit overcooked.

Bar Pitti (Village). Another casual Italian, but very hectic. We had two courses and a bottle of wine and were out the door in 45 minutes, with crazy brusque service. But the boar pasta was just fantastic and it's a good place, if I lived here it'd be one of my neighborhood joints.

Egg (Williamsburg). Lovely American breakfast / lunch place. Really excellent pork sausage, good duck hash, tasty comfort food prepared well. Sticking with the Williamsburg theme, the hipster service was comically incompetent but charming and friendly.

Spitzer's (Lower East Side). Nice little corner bar with wide open windows on a good weather day. Plenty of beers on tap, also a good grilled cheese sandwich. The fries looked good. NY doesn't have nearly as many pub-type places as we have on the west coast, this one was nice.

Ken and I are in New York for a couple of weeks. We are food tourists. Here's some notes on places we've eaten.

Craft (Flatiron). Our first and, so far, best meal in NY. Perfectly cooked bits of delicious meat. My short ribs were excellent, as was my ballotine of suckling pig, a sort of charcuterie. All very simple, but also very solid. Good service, nice room. I may go back.

Le Gigot (West Village). A solid little French restaurant, of the sort you can find everywhere in Paris and almost nowhere in San Francisco. Nice salad, slightly odd cassoulet. The meats were all cooked perfectly but the broth was a bit weird, too dark and tasting of Kitchen Bouquet. Still, I liked the place.

Thalassa (Tribeca). Somewhat upscale Greek. It was OK, but not great. Very simple and spare cooking, which is appropriate: grilled fish with a bit of olive oil, grilled shrimp with a bit of olive oil. Interesting fish, good quality, but neither were cooked quite right. Execution is everything in this kind of place and it fell just a bit short.

Mercer Kitchen (SoHo). I have a fond spot in my heart for this American classic restaurant, one of the best cocktails I've ever had was a French 75 here some 10 years ago. Sunday brunch was uninteresting. Too crowded, boring menu, indifferent hamburgers (!) and omelettes. Resting on a reputation.

Soho Sushi (SoHo). Delivery sushi at a friend's. Pretty good, really, but with delivery it's hard to be sure what you're really getting. Some of the rolls were ill advised.

Pigalle (Times Square). A solid little French brasserie, of the sort you find everywhere in Paris but almost nowhere in San Francisco. Not quite as solid as Le Gigot. I've been three times now and it's reliable, spacious, and the cooking is adequate. Lunch was uninspired.

John's Pizzeria (West Village). Glad I got the NY pizza out of the way. Entirely adequate, uninteresting, I can get as good a pizza in San Francisco only delivered to my house with my wine and my television. (Or in Zürich, or in Paris, or.. pizza is a commodity.) The best thing about John's is it's near Grom; save room for gelato.

Where I really want to dine are 11 Madison, Le Bernardin, and Per Se. Sadly they are all very hot tables and three weeks was not advanced enough booking.

Ken and I ate well on our trip up to Vancouver, BC and back. Some notes on where we went.

In Vancouver, on the fine dining end we were impressed by West which is still excellent despite the changes over the years. The most inventive cooking we had was at L'Abattoir, really precise and interesting food in a trendy, slightly too noisy room. For more old school we enjoyed dinner at Hy's Encore, classic steakhouse with terrific service and very good food. Also enjoyed a more casual lunch at Joe Fortes, seafood in a businessman's bar and grill setting. The awkward middle ground was Le Crocodile, the service and room were not up to the promise (and expense) of the classic French menu. Not that we suffered, mind you, and the wine list is excellent. Regrettably we didn't get to Vij's despite many strong recommendations.

Portland treated us well on two quick overnights. Jake's Famous Crawfish was great; it can be hit or miss but we had a hit that night with fantastic crab claw dish with mushrooms and artichokes. And an interesting evening at the Gilt Club, a sort of hipster late night restaurant / bar. The menu was a bit odd but the cocktail selection was fantastic. I had the BLT, "House Roma tomato vodka, basil & lemon olive oil and fresh lemon - up with bacon salt." It was amazing.

The main destination for our Nordic trip was Norway, driving up the coast from Bergen to Tromsø (flying over part of the 1800km). The west coast of Norway is incredibly rugged, full of mountains and fjords. Lots of beauty along the twisty slow roads. As you get further north it gets sparser and quieter and colder but never truly isolated. There were too many places we went to write them all up, here's the highlights. My favourite place was Lofoten, a remote peninsula and islands that's very rural, mostly old fishing villages. It's a big tourist destination and well worth it, beautiful and quiet. We stayed at the fantastic Reine Rorbuer, a hotel made out of old fishing cabins with a very good restaurant attached. I could easily spend a relaxed week or two there.

Most of the cities we visited were nice. Bergen's great (do the Norway in a Nutshell tour), Trondheim's pleasant, Bodø is tiny, Andennes is sad, and Tromsø is surprisingly sophisticated for being so far north. Oslo's a lovely big city, the Aker Brygge is an example of urban redevelopment working successfully and the Vigeland sculptures in Frogner Park are terrific. But while we enjoyed all these places none were really exciting, nothing so great I have to go back. I was particularly missing a good cultural museum that explains Norway's history; being under Danish rule for so many centuries seems to have limited the historical imagination.

I can't talk about Norway without remarking on how terribly expensive it is. We're used to high European prices but between Norway's robust oil economy and its insulation from the eurozone financial crisis it's way out of hand. Crappy paper cup of coffee? $5. Pint of beer? $12. Main course at a decent restaurant? $50. Pretty much everything cost double what it does in San Francisco and some 50% more than most of Europe, making it hard to recommend Norway as a tourist destination right now.

This post seems negative. Truthfully, Norway was a bit boring and the cuisine was a bit disappointing. But it is a beautiful country, the people are friendly, it's sophisticated and comfortable. I'd gladly live there (at least in the summer) and I'd be happy to go back as a tourist.

The Faroes was the most fascinating stop on our Nordic trip. It's a tiny country of 50,000 people with its own distinct language and culture. Just a few islands between Iceland and Norway at 62°N, a Viking outpost. The terrain is mostly mountains and fjords that go straight into the sea with so little flat land that gardens are built on beaches and giant holes are gouged out of the hard rock to make room for buildings. It's the most remote place I've ever travelled but it's also firmly modern European with a workable (if nutty) airport and good roads. Really cool place and while there's almost nothing to do I can totally recommend it for visitors. The main thing we did for our three days in the Faroes was drive around. The road system is great thanks to tunnels built between the islands in the 90s. The whole place is astonishingly beautiful. There's no trees but everything is covered in rich green sod, including the roofs. The sparse settlement makes for plenty of natural landscape; when there is a village it's just more picturesque.

The only town of any note is Tórshavn, you'll want to stay there for a short visit. We had a fine stay at the Hotel Torshavn but if I were doing it again I'd stay at the Hotel Føroyar; a bit out of town but beautiful and also home to a terrific restaurant. There's not much to do in Tórshavn but there's almost no services elsewhere; we could barely find a place serving lunch in the rest of the country!

I'm not sure what sustains the Faroes as a country. Fishing is the big industry and there's some hope of oil. Their wool and knitting are also famous (see the Faroe Knitting blog). There's a little tourism, particularly campers and hikers but I imagine that only works for a couple of months a year. The joy is visiting some place remote and beautiful. After our quick visit I started thinking how pleasant it would be to spend a month with some good books and an Internet connection.

Ken and I started our Nordic trip with three days in Reykjavik, Iceland. It's interesting; definitely part of Europe but feels somewhat American, open and friendly and culturally omnivorous. Worth a visit; a few days in Reykjavik if it's convenient or a couple of weeks to explore the whole country.

Reykjavik is a small town but quite pleasant, particularly the cafe area in the middle of town. The Hotel Borg was quite nice and we had a fine, world class dinner at Sjavarkjallarinn. The new concert hall is a stunning piece of architecture. I could take or leave the Blue Lagoon, but it's a nice way to wash off the jet-lag if you arrive too early for your hotel room to be available.

A real highlight for us was renting a plane and going on a sightseeing flight over the Þingvellir. Fun to put BISR and BIRK in the logbook, also a great way to get a sense of the land. The flying was easy; TF-GUS was a familiar 172SP and with an instructor handling the radios and navigation, we could just fly. I'd like to do more plane renting on trips; not nearly as complicated as I feared.