Cooking on the Road

This blog article was originally posted on my first blog In Our Pond.  I started out trying to put all my travel content on my homeschooling blog, but it grew to be too big.  So, I'm moving all the road trip stuff over here!  It'll probably take me a while to move all the posts, but I'll also be posting new content on here as well.  In Our Pond will now be exclusively for homeschooling and parenting content, while this blog (Party Through the USA) is for all the family travel posts.  Check them both out!

It's Road Trip Tuesday, and I'm back with more packing and planning ideas for summer travel.  Today, we're going to talk about hotels.  We try to stay a hotels with a kitchenette in the room, and a good breakfast.  After a long day of travel, it's nice to have the option of making some "real food" for the kids.  It also helps to calm the kids to eat something familiar in an unfamiliar place.


Most of the time, my husband and I will eat either PBJ sandwiches or a microwave meal.  Occasionally, we'll order food to be delivered to the room, or we'll order the whole family a pizza.  In the mornings, we try to take a few minutes to eat a good meal at the hotel breakfast bar.  If a breakfast at the hotel isn't an option, then it's easy to pack breakfast foods to eat on the road.  Here's what we pack in our "hotel kitchen."

Our Hotel Kitchen

- travel bottle with soap

- washcloth

- dish towel

- metal butter knife

- tiny knife

- paper cups

- disposable spoons

I'm not much of a food blogger, but I tried to take lots of picture of our road trip meals for inspiration.  Each of our on-the-road lunches were themed to add interest to the meal and to help me plan them before we left.

Pirate
- sea shell pasta
- octopus hot dogs
- fruit swords
- chocolate treasure
extras: sword toothpicks

Dinosaur
- dinosaur shaped PBJ
- dino bone graham crackers
- broccolli trees
extras: dinosaur cutter

Planned But Never Done

USA                                                        John Deere
- red, white, and blue spinach salad                                  - tractor PBJ
- star shaped cheese and meat                                          - yellow and green veggies
- red, white, and blue skittles                                            - haystack rice crispies
extras: star cutter                                                              extras: tractor cutter, knife


Reptiles                                                  Cowboy
- crocodile PBJ                                                               - jerky
- summer sausage                                                          - tortilla chips
- veggies                                                                       - dried fruit
extras: crocodile cutter, knife                                         extras: none

The lunch box labels can be downloaded here.

{Dinners}
- mac and cheese packs
- bread/jam/peanut butter
- bags of cereal
- popcorn
- microwavable rice/soup/etc
- frozen potpies

To be honest, we carried in pizza twice at the hotel and ended up eating Subway or restaurant food for lunch.  Not all of our hotels were accommodating to hotel cooking (one didn't have a bathroom and several didn't have microwaves).  When you travel, you just have to go with what is cheap and practical.  No regrets.

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