Take along a cooler of fruit and okay snacks, and try a picnic when you can. Can you have breakfast in your hotel room, and not be tempted by restaurants first thing in the morning? Remember that you are on vacation, so allow yourself a splurge, just not every day and every meal.

We take two road trips a year and consider ourselves to be road warriors! My DH has no health issues but is a bit of a fussy eater. I have heart and BP issues so have to be mindful. Here's what we have learned.

Travel with a small cooler and a picnic hamper of some sort. Our hamper has two plates, cutlery, plastic glasses, a really small cutting board, cork screw ( major important!) salt, pepper, paper towels, wet wipes, plastic baggies and a small sharp knife.

Our food rule is only one meal a day in a restaurant. It's not so much the money as the calories, sodium etc. Like all rules it can be broken but that's what our goal is.

Breakfast is almost always fruit and cereal in the room. DH goes out early and brings back coffee. Once in awhile we go to a diner type restaurant for breakfast but we make it late morning and then skip lunch altogether.

Lunch is almost always a picnic. We have found small parks right in the towns to be the best venues but there are some OK roadside stop if you must...not our favourite.

We stop just before lunch and buy what we fancy. Depends on the town, sometimes the best you can do it a fresh roll and some cheese and fruit, other times you'll find markets with great take out salad bars, delis, bakeries etc.

Dinner is almost always out and we never do fast food. Find the local spots, avoid chains, spend a bit more on this meal and you'll find you will have menus that give you options. The locals will help with ideas.

Most important Sushi is right on....it's a vacation don;t be too hard on yourself.

I have driven across country many times, as well as having made many shorter road trips. It's nice to plan ahead so that you can go out when you want to, not because you have to.

Blue ice blocks for the cooler take up less room and aren't as messy as cube or block ice. If you have twice as many as you need, and stay in hotels with fridge/freezers, you can freeze them while you sleep and change them out every day or two.

With a little planning ahead, you can fix quite good meals on a hot plate in your hotel room, with minimum clean up needed. I'm not sure if you're meant to do so or not, I just never advertised that I was doing it and have never been questioned.

On the meals you make for yourself, be extra, extra good about avoiding those things you shouldn't overindulge in, so that you don't have to worry so much when you go to a restaurant. With the same idea in mind, make a commitment to get a really good walk in at least once a day, exercising to mitigate some of the dietary "sins" you'll be bound to commit unknowingly while eating food you didn't prepare for yourself.

But, if eating out is something you look forward to, there are ways to eat healthily in restaurants. Many, especially nowadays, have entrees specifically catering to folks with dietary restrictions.

Also, when you go into a restaurant, let the server know exactly what your dietary issues are. If they have been on the job for any length of time, they have dealt with it before and can help you choose.

Don't be afraid to ask for dishes not on the menu, or to alter ones that are. For example, if there is a pasta dish you fancy, but it is in a cream sauce, ask if you might have the same dish made with a sauce of olive oil, garlic, chicken stock and a squeeze of lemon. The worst they can do is say no.

One of the biggest problem with eating out for an extended period of time is portion size. Eating half your entree, and coming up with creative ways to use the leftover for lunch the next day is one way to deal with that factor. (Save grilled meats or fish to top a deli-bought salad with or make sandwiches or wraps.) Another is splitting an entree or ordering from the appetizer menu. Some restaurants will charge you a small fee for splitting an entree. Sometimes this can be waived if you order a salad or appetizer to split as a starter as well.

But, overall, have a great time and as others have said, don't be too hard on yourself. Be extra good for a week or two before you leave and a week or two after, and you shouldn't do too much damage. :D

I second (or third) the cooler for healthier snacks and cold drinks.

As an offshoot on the "hot plate" theme, the girls and I always travelled with an electric skillet. I put salt and pepper, a spatula and a spoon inside. We nearly always had breakfast in the motel, and sometimes we had supper, lunch was a picnic or our big meal out.

With that skillet I made pancakes, eggs of all types, hash browns, toast, chili, burgers, grilled cheese sandwiches, tuna noodle casserole, spanish rice, various stir fries, chicken, fish, lots of things. It saved a lot of time and fat calories as well as cash and it's good for heating leftovers or frozen entrees too. I even made cookies in that frying pan with tubes of purchased cookie dough, flattened and flipped to brown both sides. Not really a baked cookie, but a sweet snack for the girls when they wanted one and the rest of the dough went into the cooler for another snack later.

Still, have fun, you're on vacation, so don't get too healthy or spend precious "fun" time trying to cook too much.

Annie

Donna, What fun; we love road trips too.

As mentioned, a cooler is essential, but I'm sure you know that. Our electric (plug in) cooler has certainly paid it's way over the years. When out in the middle of nowhere the hotels/motels don't have refrigerators and/or microwaves so it's helpful that the cooler has a converter to plug into a wall outlet in the room. I keep gel packs and refreeze them when there is an opportunity.

Also, I've become pretty good at making simple meals for 2 with the Express (you know that silly as-seen-on-TV grill) ; especially breakfasts.

Claire de Luna is an expert on what essentials to pack!

If we know we will be going to a major city, I will buy and print restaurant.com coupons before we leave home. I watch for the monthly 80% emails so if we don't use them I'm not out a lot of $$. We used 2 in Charleston last week.

I hope you have a great time!

Here is a link that might be useful: Express Grill

The cooler idea is fantastic. In previous years, we were RV'ers, so we got used to having a fridge with us. So last year, we took a cooler in the car and stashed drinks, coffee creamer, and other things in it. We had no idea that so many motels had fridges in the rooms these days. (Even a Motel 6 did!) However, what we discovered: they didn't always have a big enough freezer to house Blue Icees. So we had to get ice almost every day.

Our normal habit is to get going REALLY early in the morning (6 am), drive for a couple of hours, and THEN get breakfast out. Then the next real meal is an early dinner. I never thought about carrying any cooking equipment - or haven't since RV days, anyway. The only cooking equipment we always carry is our own coffee pot, coffee grinder (hubby likes freshly ground beans) and commuter mugs.

I love the idea of grabbing lunch inside a grocery store. Though you have to be careful of ANY processed foods for sodium. Last summer we got tired of eating out, and grabbed salads at a grocery store one time. At least this way, I could stash my own supply of salad dressing in the cooler!

Thanks for the hints -

Donna

I had to grin at Cathy who thinks I'm an expert at essentials. She saw what I brought for living in a condo for a week, although we usually don't bring quite so much. I do admit liking to be prepared.

Typically, we do what Sharon and Clive do, except we also bring our own Toddy Coffee (which is already cold brewed and concentrated so a little makes a lot), half and half, and 2-4 gallon Aqua-Tainers full of filtered water from home. (Eight gallons lasts us a couple of weeks, and that is making coffee, drinking water, and included water for our dog when she was with us.)

We buy ice every day, keep a few items in the cooler, and pack a snack bag with pre-portioned things. I always pack a little: cheese(s), fruit, celery/carrots, peanut butter/jam, along with a couple of carbonated beverages. The snack bag always has crackers, some kind of nuts, apples, bananas, oranges and maybe some M&M's, pretzels or cookies. We love stopping if there's a Trader Joe's in a town we're passing through, a Farmers Market or even an interesting looking store.

I have some Lock and Lock travel pitchers, which hold quite a lot and don't spill, and I keep a Lock N Lock water bottle we refill from the car to take to our room with the cooler. We usually also keep a picnic pack like Sharon does, although we also pack a small travel size bottle of liquid detergent, a bottle brush (for cleaning coffee mugs) and some dishtowels for washing/drying a few dishes. Beside the corkscrew, a five-way bottle/jar opener, a pair of scissors, a knife, small bamboo cutting board, I also pack two salad size plates, two bowls, two coffee cups, a couple of spreader utensils, a serving spoon and a couple of SS sporks, and napkins; along with two glass Lock N Locks for restaurant leftovers. There have been many times we don't eat an entire restaurant meal, but could reheat what was leftover for lunch/dinner the next day. Sometimes we go out for breakfast instead, eating leftovers for dinner from the night before if it was good! If I don't want to deal with leftovers, sometimes David and I split a meal, we order an extra salad, or I order off the appetizer menu. It all depends.

If you map your route, you can actually check for interesting restaurants on Trip Advisor or Urban Spoon. I personally like Urban Spoon, because it lists the local favorites. I always cut and paste the ones that might be an option and make a trip notebook. You can get post-it index tabs and write the city you'll be passing through on it, to easily find the town you're passing through. (I make a category for lodging and one for restaurants; another for places of interest.) My notebook has saved us many times, when we didn't know exactly where to go.

If you're driving past a Cracker Barrel, they usually have good salads, which I tend to crave when I'm traveling. I don't know why but it's hard to find good salads and fresh vegetables on the road.

Have fun. (I'm hoping this isn't TMI.) I think it's easy to manage and still eat well if you plan ahead a little. It's a lot like traveling in an rv, only downsized!

Here is a link that might be useful: Travel Pitchers

Supermarkets, especially the better ones, have good prepared foods at reasonable cost. The prepared food cases, together with the deli, the bakery, the salad bar and the produce department offer many possibilities for a good and easy meal on the road.

Google the best supermarkets and print out a list of locations of their stores along your vacation route.

Jim

A 12v portable refrigerator that plugs in your car's lighter outlet is inexpensive and very light weight.

It also happens to be a heater also, you just flip a switch it will change from a cooler to a warmer for your food.

dcarch