Taking food with you when you travel? - Page 2

We usually take a cooler with drinks, sandwhiches already made, chips, cookies, and fruit.

When we do travel, and are staying in hotel rooms, the ones we have always gotten have always had fridges and microwaves, even the really cheap ones that we've come across have been equiped the same. If we're travelling across borders, I stop at a supermarket where we're going and buy most things there unless it's a dry snack food. No sense in bringing something if there is a chance of it getting taken at the border. I also make sure that I pick up fresh fruit to for snacks. Gotta have the cereal, bread & sandwich makings. Milk will stay well in a cooler with ice if there is no fridge, or use one of the trash cans and fill it full of ice, just make sure that you keep it topped up with ice, or just buy enough to last each day.

In the area that I live in, hockey is a big thing. Which means that there is a lot of out of town tournaments and travelling during the winter season. Some tips I've been given from veteran hockey mom's that have multiple kids in hockey is to pack pretty much everything that you want to eat. Allow some cash for snacks and a meal out but most everything is brought from the room or eaten at the hotel room. For these hungry kids, they bring the bbq and tailgate, or they bring their crockpots and cook a roast in one and potatos in another. For lunch they have soup on in the crockpot so that whoever comes back to the room between games can have a hot meal to go with their sandwiches. In places where they are able to rent a kitchenette, they make sure that they do and if it's big enough they share it with more than one family.

We generally drive to our destinations, so we always pack 'snack packs' for the car. Generally we have pre-made sandwiches, chips, snack crackers, goldfish, twizzlers, granola bars, nutrigrain bars and cookies. I pre-pack everything in bowls in a small tote so they are ready to grab quickly when needed. We keep a cooler with water, milk, juice and sometimes soda. We also keep deli meat, and pre-made meals in there. I often make meals in the week before a trip, and then freeze it in single-size servings. Things like spaghetti and chili, goulash and almost any casserole work great for this. They make a quick and easy lunch or snack, or even a late supper if we had a late lunch. We've stayed at hotels that don't have refrigerators or microwaves in the room, but they often have microwaves in the lobby for everybody to use. We've even packed a small microwave when we were gone for more than a week on one trip. We just keep a cooler of ice if there is no fridge...usually ice is free at hotels anyway. We do this for camping too.

That being said, we do usually eat out once or even twice per day while on vacation...we feel that is part of our 'get away'. I just like to be prepared when we are sitting in our room at midnight and decide we are hungry. LOL

We also use our supper leftovers for lunch the next day (or snacks at night).

We flew to Disney last year and that really threw me off. LOL. We had the 'dining plan', so most of our meals were already paid for, but I still took nutrigrain bars, granola bars and various other prepackaged items. We also carried a water thermos with us everywhere we went. We didn't spend a dime on bottled water or sodas, we just refilled our thermos and water bottles (we brought from home) at water fountains.

This is a great thread with great ideas

I just brought a bunch of salads and fresh fruit to my parent's house.  To keep it cool, we repurposed soda bottles by freezing water inside them to keep it cool - no buying ice required!