As I’ve said, my husband and I are all about the road trip. It’s how we can afford to travel to most of the places we’ve been, cutting out airfare and rental car costs, and I absolutely love to drive. My husband spent many years as a road musician so his love of the road is slightly less than mine, however he’s willing to go along on the ride with me. My favorite trips are to our wonderful state and national parks, and most of the time I’ll make a lot of foods in bulk, keeping them in a cooler for the long weekend or week trek. Here’s a sampling of what we bring with us.
We can sleep pretty well in our Honda Element with the seats down, and renting the camping spots with electric allows us to use an electric blanket on cold nights. The electric comes in handy as we’re addicted to coffee and tea, and our little electric water heater/coffee press combination works smoothly.
Smoothies, juices and lots of water: we’ve only traveled with our juicer once and it was kind of a mess, if you juice you know what I mean. It’s one thing to juice and clean up at home or at the office, but in a car it’s a whole other story. However I do think fresh juice is worth it, so if we go out for a week again I’ll give it a try again. For long weekends, you can juice at home in bulk and bring the juices in mason jars. We like to stock up on orange juice, tomato juice, and green juices for the road.
Protein bars: the two best bars I’ve ever made came from Oh She Glows. Buy her cookbook and make her Classic Glo Bar and her Present Glo Bar, Saran Wrap them individually, double bag, and put in the cooler. They’ll stay good for a week! I’m not a fan at all of any store bought bars, they make me feel full and I just don’t like buying anything processed. These bars are wonderful and great for hikes.
Salads: I make a ton of jarred bean salads and pasta salads for these trips. They keep for about 4 days in the cooler. The bean salads consist of: black beans, kidney beans, avocado, jalapeños, tomatoes, cumin, cilantro, zucchini. The pasta salads consist of: spiral pasta, garbanzo beans, veganaise, dill, lemon juice, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers. I’ll add other veggies, just what I have on hand, to change it up. As with all my recipes, I don’t measure I just taste as I go so you might want to look up some real recipes if you prefer. 🙂 The salads are great cold and aren’t too heavy for a day of long hiking!
Places: so pretty much any park I’m happy with, but here are our favorites so far. Write to me if you want to hear more about which hikes to go on, or if you have other comments! I’ll add to this with every park trip we take.
Texas: Big Bend NP is by far the best. I hope my ashes are scattered here. I want to go back every year. The night sky is unbelievable, the hikes are awesome, the lodging is good (haven’t camped here yet) and the scenery is like no place else.
Other places in Texas that are great: Palo Duro, Enchanted Rock, Pedernales Falls, Garner.
Utah: Arches and Canyonlands! Canyonlands was especially special because no one was there. No one. We had the entire park to ourselves. Pretty much at least. We saw one other family the whole time, but that was it. Unbelievable. Arches was as pretty as all the pics, definitely hike on out to the arches!