Sweet Treats

The best part of traveling around the country is eating a variety of food including deserts that are special to a city or state! 

Beignets

1. Beignets: are classic food unique to New Orleans that can only be eaten at Cafe Du Monde. Beignets are hot doughnuts covered in powder sugar and were a delicious snack and are definitely worth it!
2. Voodoo Doughnuts: our staff surprised us with some Voodoo doughnuts in Portland for dessert! Voodoo doughnuts aren't just regular doughnuts, but are covered with unique toppings like M&Ms, Captain Crunch Berries, Fruit Loops, and Oreo's. The doughnut with the Captain Crunch Berries was surprisingly good! I wish I got more than a half! (Note: There is a Voodoo doughnut store inside Universal Studios if you want to try them!)  

3. 

   A Voodoo doughnut with Captain Crunch Pieces

   .

   LA Kosher Pizza: LA had the best Kosher Pizza I have ever had! (New York's Kosher pizza is probably good as well.) If you keep Kosher, I totally recommend going to LA just for the pizza! (Because this was a Conservative Jewish trip we had to keep Kosher. Kosher just means eating food that has a certain symbol on it.) It was the first pizza and so called real food I ate in almost 3 weeks and was delicious. (Most of our dinners were catered. We ate cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch.) 
4. Diddy Riese: is an ice cream shop similar to the Bake Bear here and was in LA. I believe I got 2 cookies with M&Ms and I don't remember what flavor of ice cream. It was special because our whole bus was treated to ice cream! All I remember was that it was very messy.

2 Hotels; Haunted and a Bar Exam

On Wheels we pretty much always stayed at hotels. It was very fun being in hotel room with friends without my parents night after night! Our bus had two interesting experiences at two hotels we stayed at!

Rapid City, South Dakota:
Hotel Alex Johnson wasn't any ordinary hotel. Supposedly, it is haunted. Rumor has it that a female ghost referred to as the lady in "Lady in White" haunts the 8th floor especially Room 812. The woman frequently stayed at the hotel and supposedly jumped from a window in her room to her death. Some people believe it was a suicide, but others believe it was a murder. Many people on our bus began to freak out that we were going to stay in a haunted hotel. Our staff repeatedly told us that the hotel wasn't haunted, but we continued to persist. Some of us even downloaded ghost hunter apps to see if we could find some ghosts. We did a Lip Sync Battle Competition that night and another group made a skit using the Ghostbusters theme song which was very funny! (My group performed Let it Go.) Fortunately, we only stayed there for one night and I don't think any of us stayed on the 8th floor or saw any ghosts.

Portland, Oregon:
If you really know me, you would know that I'm very loud and talkative. Keeping my mouth shut is definitely a challenge for me. I was forced to be quiet for the entire night with my friends in my room and also in the morning while eating breakfast and repacking the bus. It was a challenge for me. Coincidentally, we stayed in a Red Lion Hotel the night before the Oregon Bar Exam. I remember going on the balcony to talk to my friends in another room next door. A woman scolded us to be quiet kind of rudely. I'm just trying to have fun with my friends. However, we got to pray Shacharit (the morning service outside) and got to see this cool view! Also, our staff told us that like 1/3 of people taking the Bar Exam end up failing anyways. 

Siddur and Stickers

Stickers are not just for kids anymore! Nowadays, people cover their water bottles, laptop covers, suitcases, notebooks etc. with stickers! I bet you have never seen a siddur covered in stickers before? (A siddur is the Jewish prayer book.) Did you know you different places may have free stickers if you ask?

Everyone on a USY summer trip gets their own personal siddur you can decorate however you want! (We have to pray at least 2 times a day.😥) One of the uniquest parts of USY on Wheels or any USY trip is decorating the cover or outside of your siddur in stickers from all or as many places as possible you visited to remember your trip! Some museums, ice cream shops or places may have free stickers if you just ask at the information desk or cashiers. However, I bought the majority of my stickers.

I really loved collecting stickers. I have stickers from the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, NASA, the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, New Orleans, Cabbage Patch Kids, Sedona, Mount Rushmore (which was very over priced), Chicago, CNN, etc. I also still have some stickers that I didn't put on my siddur.

My favorite sticker is the one, I bought in New Orleans because it is a beignet. The beignet has a little face drawn on it. I also like the rocket sticker from NASA because it is a very unique shape and a good shape to use for the spine. I also love my big circle sticker from Sedona because it is very colorful with shades of purple, pink, and green. The stickers I bought previously were lacking in colors and shows the red rocks that are unique to Sedona.

My Wheels siddur is very special to me because it isn't an ordinary siddur. It's a colorful one with stickers on the outside, sticky notes I wrote reflecting on a prayer or life and Dove wrappers that hold inspirational quotes. (I still need to decorate the edges of the pages when the siddur is closed.) I bring it with me to most times when I go to services on Saturday.

I'm really proud of how my siddur turned out!

The front cover of my siddur

The back cover of my siddur