In her years as a travel agent, Ellen Morse has created international travel itineraries for many happy clients. Over the past couple years, she has extended her expertise to the gluten free community by launching Gluten Free Travel - US. She takes pride in helping her gluten free clients find suitable destinations, and the list of destinations continues to expand. Among the places her clients traveled this past summer were South America, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Turkey, and Australia. Other clients of hers are looking forward to upcoming trips to Puerto Rico, Rome, London, and Paris. Ellen reports that it's especially exciting to learn of the wonderful changes that have taken place in Paris. I can speak about our own family's experience in Paris several years ago, and despite the wonderful trip it turned out to be, finding a gluten free meal in Paris (or even someone who truly understood what "gluten free" meant) was a real challenge back then. Our family dined a couple times at the only gluten free restaurant in Paris (it was in Montmartre). However, despite being a hub of international and local gluten free diners, that restaurant closed its doors about a year after we visited.... Read more →
September 2013
Julie Bourne, our regular college blogger who also publishes her own Blog called The Campus Celiac, spent the summer in Seattle and shared with us some of her top restaurant picks for gluten free dining. You will find links within the article to her more detailed reviews of these restaurants on our website, GlutenFreeTravelSite, where you can also do a search to read dozens of other reviews of GF-friendly restaurants in Seattle. Simply visit our Search/Mapping page and enter "Seattle" or a specific zip code into the Search box. You'll get a list of places that have been reviewed. Click on any business to see it plotted on the adjacent map where you can click through to read the user-submitted review. While people probably don’t ordinarily associate Seattle with summertime, this is where I spent my summer, working -- and more importantly – eating! I always thought that I had it made, living in Denver, where there is usually an abundance of gluten free options at my fingertips. That was before I spent an extended amount of time in the city of Seattle, specifically the Capitol Hill neighborhood, which is the Pacific Northwest’s hipster mecca. I was working full-time right... Read more →
Have you tried the gluten free assortment of LUNA Protein bars? Do you love them as much as our family does? We all have a different favorite flavor, but one thing we can agree on is that they make a delicious, healthy snack for between meals...and are perfect for travel. How would you like a chance to WIN a whole box of 12 LUNA Protein bars in your favorite flavor? Gluten Free Travel Blog and our sister website, GlutenFreeTravelSite, are hosting a contest in honor or Celiac Awareness Day, this Friday September 13, in which one lucky winner will receive a box of LUNA bars. How do you enter? Simply submit a gluten free dining or travel review to GlutenFreeTravelSite between now and 12:00 NOON (Eastern time) on Friday, September 13, and you will be entered into a drawing in which we will select ONE lucky winner at random from the pool of entries (review submissions). You can submit a review of a restaurant, market, hotel, resort, inn, cruise ship -- or even a college, camp, or church that offers GF communion. Each review submission will count as one entry into the contest. You may submit as many reviews of... Read more →
I have a Red Sox T-shirt that says, "Married Into It." Well, I had the good fortune to "marry into" something else equally as awesome in the Boston area...a family of ice cream makers. Yes, my husband has not one -- but two -- cousins who own ice cream shops in the Boston area and specialize in high-quality, homemade ice cream in unique and innovative flavors. Although we live in the Washington DC area, we try to get up to Boston every so often. On our most recent trip in August, we surprised my husband's cousin Joe Rancatore, the owner of Rancatore's Ice Cream Shop in Lexington (and another in Belmont), with a visit. He happened to be in the back making ice cream when we arrived at the shop, so we were fortunate enough to get a sneak peak into the ice cream making process. Our 10 and 12-year old sons especially enjoyed this! Not only does Joe use only the highest quality ingredients in his ice cream, he's constantly coming up with new flavor combinations. And many are gluten free. (Obviously, flavors like hydrox, grapenut raisin, and Irish coffee-and-cookies are not!) The best thing is, his staff is... Read more →