Check out roadside eateries via the information highway

The road to the best in road food begins in Alpharetta, Ga. That's where Gary and Kathy Nickerson planted the flag for EatHere.com, a World Wide Web site devoted to documenting the road food hangouts you remember from those pile-in-the-car vacations.

Gary, 50, and Kathy, 48, have fond memories of such road trips, but they have an even fonder memory, an anecdote about how they met. In the road food stories section of the site, you can read about how a smart-aleck young diner (Gary) annoyed a young waitress (Kathy) until she accepted his offer of a date.

They've shared their own memories, but they've also received a healthy helping of road-food lore from the Web community, and a passel of good reviews in the three months since they opened the site. In addition to restaurant reviews and recipes the site serves up message boards on topics from road food slang to remembrances of Burma Shave signs.

After they created animations of six Burma Shave rhymes on the site, readers began sending in their own favorites.

The Nickersons accept no advertising from restaurants, but they're looking for a few long-term sponsorships from travel-related companies.

The reviews are sorted into a menu that includes Burgers & Dogs, Barbeque, Real Ice Cream and others. But some categories, like Country Inns, have had to be discontinued for lack of interest.

They rely on the great out-there to nominate sites for their listings, but they confirm the bona fides and menus of each location. From a base of 30 restaurants in October, the site has grown to include about 200 reviews, with a few new ones coming in daily.

"But we're not trying to be a comprehensive directory," Gary says, "We just want to fill our little niche."

Gary's dream is for the site to generate enough income for the Nickersons to hit the road as food-tasters.

He's itching to try out road-food eateries like Hudson's Hamburgers in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

The Spokane man who submitted Hudson's noted that the 14-stool diner, which has been operated by the same family since 1907, serves no fries or shakes with its grilled burgers, but says we like it that way.

For now, the Nickersons will continue to build the site and dream of road trips to come.