The tiny Fly Trap cafe in Ferndale, a suburb of Detroit, would seem at first glance to be an unlikely locale to celebrate a landmark birthday, in my case the 65th.

Yet there I was, noshing on a juicy and savory Reuben sandwich and thinking that it was one of the best birthdays ever.

The Fly Trap lunch was part of a multiyear odyssey – to visit every state and to hit as many Triple-D places as possible.

Triple-D?

That's shorthand for "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives," the popular Food Network show in which Guy Fieri, a bejeweled, tattooed, spiky-haired chef and restaurateur from California, visits locally owned cafes around the nation, samples their specialties and often helps their cooks prepare them.

My wife, Doris, and I began the visit-every-state quest more than a decade ago, several years before Fieri won a Food Network competition to host his own show. Typically, we fly into a starting point city, hit four or five states in a week or two, and then fly back to California from some other city.

After we became hooked on Triple-D, however, its sites became part of the trip planning. The Fly Trap visit, for instance, was part of an arc of travel that began in Detroit, moved north into Michigan's Upper Peninsula, then westward into Wisconsin, Minnesota and slices of South Dakota and Iowa before terminating in Omaha.

I prepared for the sojourn by downloading a list of Triple-D eateries from the Food Network website, then arranging them by state and picking out the places we'd try to hit, beginning with the Fly Trap. Along the way, however, we happened to check in to a hotel in Wisconsin, turned on the television and found a new Triple-D episode just beginning, one that featured a Cuban restaurant in Minneapolis.

We were headed to that city anyway, so our first stop the next evening was Victor's 1959 Café and an introduction to Cuban cuisine. After a very good meal, I asked the owner what effect the Triple-D exposure had on business and she said it had tripled overnight.

That's been a common response when we've posed the question to operators of other Triple-D places, although a waiter at Austin's Magnolia Cafe, where we ate very recently, said it was so busy already that the TV appearance had had little noticeable effect.

I haven't kept an exact count of how many Triple-D places we've hit but would say it's been several dozen so far, and we've rarely been disappointed. In addition to those we've visited on our interstate travels, we've made a point of hitting as many in California as we can, although that in itself would be a journey of massive proportions since Fieri's home state also boasts the most – 81 so far and still counting.

Fieri owns restaurants in Sonoma County and in the Sacramento area (Tex Wasabi's in Sacramento and Johnny Garlic's in Roseville), so Northern California is particularly heavy with eateries he's featured, as one can glean from FlavortownUSA.com, an independent website devoted to the show.

The advent of FlavortownUSA means that Triple-D devotees no longer have to manipulate the Food Network website to learn the location of the show's featured cafes. One can just plug in a city and instantaneously see all of them in the area. Needless to say, it's bookmarked on my traveling laptop.

Sacramento is no slouch. In addition to Fieri's own places, there are seven Triple-D joints in the immediate Sacramento area, such as the Squeeze Inn, famous for its hamburgers, and Giusti's, a venerable restaurant in the Sacramento-San Joaqun Delta near Walnut Grove. Others include The Golden Bear, Jamie's Bar and Grill, Dad's Kitchen, Café Rolle and Gatsby's Diner.

There are literally dozens more in the San Francisco Bay Area and each listing in FlavortownUSA includes an address, a phone number, a website if the cafe has one, and a locator map.

We're not alone in including Triple-D stops in our travels. Some fully retired folks, especially those who roam the country in motorhomes, are fanatics. On one recent Triple-D episode, Fieri interviewed one couple who was visiting its 100th, a hot dog haven in Virginia, as I recall.

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