Food for the family road trip

I've been on a lot of road trips (as you know), but this will be my first family road trip; my 13-year-old stepson will be along. Also, the road-tripping is the vacation this time; rather than driving straight through to some far destination, we'll be meandering through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas, spending several hours each day driving, but also stopping to eat, sleep, and see things.

But we're still trying to keep this economical. Thanks to our Prius, we can cover close to 4,000 miles on $300 in gas. We'll stay in the nearest Motel 6 each night. My annual National Parks Pass (last year's birthday present from my parents) means we can skip paying admission at all the national parks we plan on visiting.

Which just leaves food. We can eat at least two meals a day out of the cooler in the backseat, stocked with sandwiches, fruit, homemade cookies, and road-trip staples like beef jerky and trail mix. We'll have a couple of picnics in the great outdoors. Dinner will be eaten in an actual non-chain restaurant each night.

I've written about road food before (and here), but with a kid along, we'll need more kid-friendly fare.

How do you go about stocking a cooler for minimal expense?

1. Buy bottled water on sale, and freeze the bottles. These will be the ice for your cooler; they can be refrozen each night (thanks to the microwave-fridge that comes with each room at the Motel 6) or drunk as they melt. In a pinch, the hotel can provide ice for the cooler. Refill empty water bottles and Camelbaks each night in the sink.

2. Sandwiches and wraps. I'll buy a loaf of bread, some sliced turkey and cheese, a package of large tortillas, and a big box of salad greens at Costco. Add a small jar of mustard and a jar each of peanut butter and jelly and sandwiches are taken care of. The salad greens will go inside the tortillas, along with bacon and some shredded cheese, to become wraps. (And a much-needed source of greenery.)

3. A variety of other stuff. I made two batches of chocolate chip cookies. Costco also provided apples, bananas, beef jerky, granola bars, and the base ingredients for some homemade trail mix (nuts, dried fruit, chocolate chips). In addition, I packed some dried fruit, a small bag of baby carrots, a box of cereal, a bag of pretzels, and some crackers.

4. Caffeine. This can be slightly tricky, depending on how you feel about cheap truck stop coffee. Normally tea is the basis of my road trip caffeine; hot tea bags are cheap and easy to pack, and I can throw one into my refillable mug every morning and top it off with free hot water at the nearest gas station. Ditto iced tea bags--throw one into the Camelbak, add water, done. But my husband is a coffee drinker, and I'm getting back into drinking coffee myself. So we'll need a way to get decent coffee while on the road--that's not from Starbucks or a gas station.

I think the way to solve that problem is with iced coffee. I can make two large Thermoses of good coffee before we leave home, and doctor them up with cream, simple syrup and an orange peel. Then each morning we'll fill the Camelbaks with free hotel ice, add the coffee, and away we go. I'm not sure we'll have a full ten days' supply  in those two Thermoses, but I can go back to drinking tea when it runs out and my husband can drink gas station coffee for a couple of days.

Regardless, if we're carrying our own coffee and tea supplies, and our own food supplies, we'll never need to buy anything at a gas station that isn't gas.

So breakfast can be wraps, fruit, and iced coffee; lunch can be sandwiches and more fruit; and there will be an infinite variety of snacks.

Other things we'll bring with us, rather than buy on the road:

Sunscreen and bug spray
A couple bottles of wine (for picnicking purposes)
All the Camelbaks, water bottles, Thermoses and travel mugs (no need to buy any beverages, ever!)
Guidebooks from the library
Tissues, paper towels, wet wipes, and Febreze (for the car)
Laundry detergent and quarters (just in case)
Silverware (rather than buying plastic)
Stamps (for postcards)

Prepping the car for a family road trip

I've taken a lot of road trips in my life, but this is the first one I'll be taking with a kid. Visions of National Lampoon's Vacation (and The Shining) keep going through my head.

More on that later. Today: getting the car ready!

What your car will need for a family road trip vacation:

1. A wash, inside and out. Clean out the pockets and glove compartment while you're at it.
2. A check-up. At the very least check the oil and tire pressure.
3. Cleaning supplies. A box of tissues, a roll of paper towels, some wet wipes, some Febreze, trash bags.
4. GPS, phone charging cords, iPod cords.
5. Speaking of iPods, cue up a good playlist. Or some books on tape.
6. Road atlas and guidebooks.
7. A blanket. Good for picnics and for naps. (And a pillow.)
8. Umbrella, flashlight, emergency kit (one of those kits with flares, jumper cables, and a first-aid kit), and a roll of duct tape.
9. Make sure your insurance, AAA membership, and spare tire are all in good shape.
10. Quarters, for parking and tolls.
11. A bottle of ibuprofen or aspirin.
12. Depending on the age of your kids, games, drawing supplies, and/or a deck of cards.

I'm also throwing in some extra totebags.

Next up: what to put in the cooler!

Ugh

I spent the Fourth of July in a fetal position.

Not because of fireworks or anything. I got a vicious stomach bug that has apparently been making the rounds at work. I think I threw up more times that day than I ever have cumulatively in my entire life. Seriously. I think I pulled something.

Fortunately, it was short-lived. I spent 12 hours in absolute agony--I couldn't even keep water down--and then as quickly as it hit me, it was gone. I managed to go to work last night, though I was operating at about 40% capacity. My stomach is fine now, I'm just still recuperating from not having eaten very much in the last couple of days.

Also, I lost four pounds in 48 hours. Yay?

Anyway, at least I got sick on an already-scheduled day off, so that I didn't have to miss any work. And better now than on the road trip, right?

Speaking of which! I will be taking my hubs and stepston to revisit some of my favorite parts of the Great 2009 Cross-Country Road Trip: namely, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. We'll see Glacier National Park, Yellowstone and Grand Teton, the Badlands and Mt. Rushmore, and Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota. It'll be an epic 10-day car loop through some fantastic scenery.

I've already been accumulating some of the things we'll need: updated summer clothes, sunscreen, new water bottles, beef jerky, a catsitter. You know, the basics. I got a bunch of travel guides from the library and new tires for the car (we needed those anyway).

T-minus two weeks and counting!

Mt. Rainier National Park, WA

I've been waiting for a Monday and a perfect weather day to coincide for a while, so that we could finally get to Mt. Rainier National Park. Why Monday? Because it's one of my two days off, and because the park would be far less crowded than on a Sunday (my other day off).

Yesterday dawned a perfectly clear, hot day. Summer has finally arrived in the Pacific Northwest, with temperatures in the high 80s (I had to run out and buy three fans this weekend). The last of the park roads had been opened--there are still two feet of snow on the ground at the higher elevations, and that's on July 1--and there were a fair amount of people in the park, but I'm sure not nearly as many as the weekend.

 It was gorgeous, naturally.

The only downside was having to drive back on two-lane mountain roads behind a bunch of slow-moving tourists. I get super-aggravated, stuck behind someone like that. I really have to find a way to not be aggravated by that, or else I'll spend the entire road trip in three weeks in full bitch mode.

Oh yeah, the road trip!

Ten days of driving through Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. At least five national parks and several national monuments. Some of the most breathtaking scenery on the continent. Ten days of sitting in a car, not working.

Stay tuned...

New clothes

Sometimes you just have to give up and spend money, you know?

Last year we both needed new clothes, but what with my husband being newly unemployed, I couldn't justify the expense. Plus, we knew we were going to move at some point--why not just wait and buy new clothes on the other side?

Well, here we are on the other side. Once we got settled and money started coming in on a regular basis, it became fairly imperative to replace the stained/old/shabby clothes we'd been coasting on for two years.

Step One: work clothes. A sale at Old Navy provided several new pairs of jeans and black pants for me. A trip to the Goodwill provided several t-shirts and a new belt. I laid out real money for new, properly-fitting bras, a new pair of Danskos, and a new pair of tennis shoes for walking to work, plus some fancy marathon-runner socks. Now I can work all week without having to worry about laundry (if I have to). New shoes and support garments were expensive, but necessary.

Step Two: non-work clothes. Another Old Navy sale provided some new threads for my husband: a new pair of jeans, some shorts, some polos, some summer shirts. I got myself a couple pairs of shorts and a few summer blouses.

Step Three: new shoes. New loafers, tennis shoes, and summer shoes for my husband; some casual slip-ons and one sparkly pair of sandals for me. Comfort was key.

It's not a wardrobe overhaul or anything; I didn't buy any dressy clothes or cute summer outfits. (Where would I wear them? I work all the time.) But it feels good to finally cross that off the to-do list, and it also feels good to be able to open my closet and find something I want to wear on my days off.

Besides, we're going on a road trip next month. That calls for new shorts and sandals, right?

As a concession to pretty new things, I bought a few pairs of earrings at Target. Those at least I can wear to work.

Living in the eternal present

It's been a long week.

It started with my cat being sick. He didn't eat anything for two days. I took him to the vet and got bloodwork done (inconclusive) and some appetite stimulants. I suspect he had a giant hairball clogging up the works. After a couple more days of moping around the house and picking at his wet cat food (which I don't normally give him), he finally pooped and is now finally starting to seem like his old self.   There were a couple of days of intense worrying on my part.

Then, there were the usual work shenanigans. Doubles four days in a row. My day job restaurant is now a hot ticket, thanks to a recent review, so lunches have been getting busier and busier. We were short a server at my night job, so the entire week there was busy and understaffed. The last two nights were nothing short of frantic; I had so many tables last night that at one point I very nearly lost control of everything. I got double-sat, on top of an already full section, which meant one of those tables didn't see me for at least fifteen minutes. I had to ask my manager to greet them and get them a cocktail. In the end, everyone got what they needed (eventually); I bought desserts for all the tables with the longest waits and so I think everyone left happy.

But goddamn, that was poorly organized. Friday night was slightly better because I was consumed with a party in the private dining room; a lot of Eurotrash with money to burn, they blew through $250 worth of cocktails (complicated ones, that I had to make) before they ever sat down. I made a lot of money off them. Last night was worse because I had a bunch of tables, not just one big one, and the reservations weren't spread out the way they should have been.

It sucked. It sucked ass. But I got through, somehow, and now I have two whole days off to rest.

The hard part about all this working is that I'm living in this sort of eternal present. Waiting tables is like that--your brain is filled with the tasks at hand, so it's hard to get outside of that and think about other things (bills, the future, your sick cat, etc.). When you're doing that all the time--well, I can't think beyond the next table, and then getting home and going to bed. The days all wash together. That's not necessarily a bad thing--time moves quickly when you're mentally and physically consumed--but it does mean there's not much quality time with my hubs. He only gets to see me for a few minutes at the end of the day, when I'm exhausted and cranky more often than not.

But hey, the bills are getting paid. I got myself a new pair of tennis shoes, so my feet can be cushy and supported even when I'm not working. I discovered a new cocktail, and also discovered that cold frozen golf balls make an excellent foot massager. My stepson is visiting for the weekend, and in a month we'll leave for our National Parks of the West road trip. When I do get a chance to think outside of what's in front of me, I think about that--about hitting the open road for ten days, and getting back to a part of the country that I love. Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota--fantastic scenery, wide-open prairie highways, and ten days of nothing to do but drive.

Another wine geek moment

On Monday, I went to a wine tasting with a few people from work. We ended up on my roof deck, drinking two bottles of wine and enjoying the views. That turned into dinner, more wine, a convertible ride, and various shenanigans. I'm usually pretty good at not crossing the line into fully drunk--I'll sometimes push right up against it, but it's rare that I'm drunk. Well, by the time we finished dinner, I was good and drunk.

In a fun, giggly way of course, and then I promptly went to bed. The hangover on Tuesday was worth it. And the wine was delicious.

The rest of the week has been fairly uneventful. A lot of work. I booked my ticket to Virginia for September, for my high school reunion and best friend's wedding, complete with an overnight connection in Boston so that I can see my friends there too. I saw my first geoduck demonstration, and I have to say that is the most phallic thing I have ever seen. Above some actual phalluses, even.

Also, check out the Seattle Times' review of Bar Sajor. I work there!