Road Trip Tips - Save Money on Food

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we are planning on a cross country (half) road trip later this year to visit my mom and then move her back here where we live. As I have our planning tips on my brain, I wanted to share those with ya'll in a series of Road Trip Tips posts.

Food on the road is easy and hard at the same time to me. On one hand, you continuously pass fast food restaurants while going down the highway. On the other hand, you don't have endless money and sometimes they are hard to get into if you have a U-haul truck or trailer. You can use up a substantial amount of time by driving around trying to find the right place to eat that everyone in your family likes and that you can get in and out of relatively easily. Not to mention it gets expensive quick! Don't forget my family is 4 children and two adults. Two of those children eat as much as an adult and one has a bottomless pit for a stomach! Here are some things we have tried on the road to make food easier and cheaper.

Buy a healthy mix of snacks at the grocery store the week before you leave to bring with you in the car. We put a container between the two kids in the back row of our mini van and filled it to the brim with yummy snacks. We brought things like dried fruit, healthy grains, nuts, peanut butter crackers, etc. This way our kids were still getting good nutrition and not being cranky because they were hungry. This allowed us to be more flexible about when we stopped for meals. As well as saved us a lot because snacks on the road (gas stations & fast food) are expensive! One night, we were behind on how far down the road we needed to be and actually opted to just munch on those snacks for dinner. We also let our kids have all the snacks they wanted whenever they were hungry on the trip if it wasn't almost a meal time. Of course, we also included a few junkier snacks and made sure everyone had a few snacks they liked. That help keep spirits up and kept us from wanting to splurge on chips at the gas stations.

Eat Breakfast at hotels and be sure your kids fill their bellies. Make sure the hotel you are staying at has a good hot breakfast. For the price of hotels, I feel it is worth it to pay a few extra dollars if necessary to stay somewhere that has a good hot breakfast. We could easily pay $75 at a restaurant to fill our family's bellies with similar food. So I factor this in the price when choosing a hotel. Reviews are a good way to find out the quality of the breakfast. We remind our kids to get some protein and fruit along with all the yummy carbs they will definitely grab. That way they aren't hungry an hour later.

Bring a cooler with you. We put jelly, fresh fruit, drinks, and small bottles of milk for my son who's lactose intolerant to drink with breakfast inside. We add a bag or two of ice every morning at our first gas stop to keep it cold all day. This allows us to easily make PB&Js for lunch at the rest areas. This also allows my husband to buy energy drinks when he sees a good price and put them in the cooler to drink through out the day. If we didn't have the cooler, it would cost much more to just buy a drink at whatever small gas station we could find when he was feeling tired. This is what he drinks instead of coffee and I definitely don't want him getting sleepy on a long drive!

Eat lunch at rest stops. I already touched on this but I wanted to make sure you didn't miss it. A big money and time saver...and frankly a sanity saver for us...is to stop at rest areas. We don't have to fight the in town traffic to try to find somewhere safe for our kids to stretch their legs and run around.  Also, sometimes we have to visit several gas stations before we can find somewhere that has a bathroom. So we already stop at almost every rest area we pass. But we now include rest areas in our meal planning. We have jelly in the cooler, peanut butter, plates, and bread in the van, and use the snacks as side items. It's an easy no-fuss lunch that saves money and gets us back on the road faster.

Get creative on where you stop. We are planing on parking at Sam's Club after we get gas this time around and go in to have lunch or dinner in the food court. It is cheaper than a fast food place and we might as well take advantage of our membership as much as we can! You can also plan a grocery store stop on your route to grab more perishable food like lunch meat and cheese. So you can have a different sandwich for lunch one day.

Bring water bottles! We mostly drink water at home anyway. It's so much cheaper and healthier then buying sodas and juices several times a day. We just refill our bottles with a big bottle of water from one of the gas stations. It's cheap and lasts several hours. If we find a particularly cheap big bottle of water, we can buy a few and put them in our cooler to keep them cold. We also might bring a little bottle of flavor enhancers like these to add once in a while to make the water more fun. It keeps them willing to drink water most of the time if they can have something fun sometimes too.

I will share one fail too. We have stored cut up fruit in baggies in the cooler and it went very badly. The water got in, the fruit was mushy, and had very little flavor. I would advise you storing whole fruit like apples and oranges in the cooler to peel when ready to eat. Or just spend a little more and buy fruit cups. I haven't decided which we'll do this time around.