What do you eat when traveling?
Jonathan and Laurie in front of Seattle's Space Needle | Self portrait
My Life and I just returned from a great trip weekend trip to Seattle.
But as we were preparing to leave town and I grabbed food at a fast food chain in the airport, and I was struck by a sign.
The sign read something to the effect of, “There’s a shortage of tomatoes in Florida, so there will be no tomatoes on your burger unless you specifically request it.”
It got me thinking several things…
- “This Seattle restaurant gets its tomatoes from nearly 3,000 miles away!”
- “There’s an entire market (Pike’s Place) less than 20 miles away full of fresh vegetables with many stands that claim to have locally grown produce.”
- “How different would our cuisine be if we restricted our meals to ingredients that were grown or raised within a 200 mile radius of our location?”
And finally…
- “While we try and eat fresh home cooked meals at home — we definitely didn’t do that during our vacation. How do others solve this dilemma, or do they?”
Airline travel makes packing meals very difficult. Most hotels have limited options for cooking (unless you find a suite with a kitchen). Even our hotel room this weekend even had a rule saying we couldn’t use the micro-bar fridge for personal items and we had to spend extra money to get another fridge brought to our room.
And so that brings me to my question for you…
What do you eat when traveling?
I’m really looking forward to some great suggestions and ideas. Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below. Thanks!
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It doesn’t work for every place or for every meal, but my wife and I have found that even if you go to a grocery store and get a rotisserie chicken or something, it ends up being significantly cheaper than eating out, and much better than fast food. Plus it’s nice if you go eat at a local park, too. We also find hotels that has a free continental breakfast, and try to fill up on that so that you’re not as hungry around noon.
When I was growing up, Dad would always stop at a breakfast buffet, usually a Shoney’s, around 10 o’clock… that way you knock out breakfast, lunch, and don’t have to eat too much for supper, either!
Ahh… a rotisserie chicken sounds like a nice idea.
Growing up we always stayed somewhere with a continental breakfast. But then the only vacations we ever took were to visit family in Nebraska, so it was usually one hotel stay there and one hotel stay back.
And all you can eat joints as often as possible.
Laurie and I have found that most of the downtown hotels we’ve stayed in don’t offer any type of continental breakfasts. So you either have to stay a bit further out to get the extra amenities like in room fridge and free breakfast and drive to everything downtown — or stay in a nicer place downtown that’s closer to everything but offers no extra amenities.
I was even shocked that this weekend’s hotel didn’t have an in-room coffee maker — and was then disappointed that I finally found it tucked away on the last night.
I’m on tour five months of the year. So I know quite a bit about hotels, especially budget hotels. If you want to make home cooked meals, I’d recommend the extended stay style of hotels which come with a small kitchen. (Studio Plus, Suburban, Extended Stay) They do not have daily housekeeping service, but you can pay $5 and have them come change your sheets and so on if you want. The kitchen usually has a full sized refrigerator, a stove, a microwave, and pots, pans, plates and cutlery. They’re generally not expensive to stay in and almost always have a guest laundry on the premises– which is a big thing when you’re traveling for two months at a time. The only problem is that the pans tend to be fairly cheap and often create a fair amount of smoke. It is possible to set off the smoke detectors.
Haha! I’m guessing you know about setting off the smoke detectors from experience?!
That’s a great idea. It may be what we decide to do next time. It’s so easy to spend LOADS of cash on food when eating out — especially when on the road.
A veggie burger at Hard Rock Cafe this weekend was $12! Adding mushrooms made it $13.50. Crazy!
Thanks for your feedback and good luck on the tour!
I bring a bag of trail mix for high-protein snacking…then I don’t panic and buy crap at meal-time. Get a little cooler! We pack it full of cheese and bring crackers or buy a loaf of bread…all hotels have an ice machine, and you can keep the food fresh for days! Also, a bag of oranges is nice. Those continental breakfasts can sometimes lack in the fruit, and you don’t want to get scurvy!
Ah yeah… love me some trail mix. Wonder if there’s a way to use a cooler as a carry-on suitcase as well…. hmmm.
Do you do anything for full meals/dinners or stick with cheese and crackers and fruit?
One thing we do when travelling is limit ourselves to only one restaurant meal a day. This has two benefits (we think) first – you have the money to spend on a really good restaurant, one that specialises in local food, local cuisines, or is simply interesting and quirky; second – for the rest of the day we visit markets and “foodie” shops that offer regional items. The benefit here is that we get to experience something of what locals look for. At the end of the day – we have more money in our pocket, and we’re not stuffed to bursting – its a win/win situation.
That’s a good idea Alexis. Not bad at all. It’s just being sure we have food the rest of the day and ways to fix it.
Thanks for the idea!