Posts Tagged: driving

Travel — 1 Comment
7
Feb 12

Eating Cheaply on the Road

eating-food-while-camping-in-mountains
Not eating sandwiches, also — backpacking, not roadtripping
Olympus E-620 with 12-60 lens
48mm, F8, 1/1600 of a second

Sandwiches. This post could be that single word. But I’ll elaborate.

I go on road trips regularly, and I don’t have a lot of money. So I’ve had a lot of time to perfect this.

When I’m on a road trip I don’t want to spend lots of time eating — there’s much to see and places to go. Energy bars are quick, but they’re dry and not exactly a meal. Jerky tastes good every once in a while. Yogurt, fruit and fruit cups are great, but they’re not meals either. Lipton packs or other quick pasta packs are a hearty meal and taste good, but they require finding an appropriate place to set up a stove and a fair bit of time. Backpacker’s pantry and other add-water type meals are alright, but they’re outrageously expensive, and they still require that you get out a stove to boil water. At least you don’t need to wash dishes afterwards. And fast food, while convenient and occasionally yummy, is unhealthy, expensive, and requires you to be in a decent sized town when you’re hungry.

Sandwiches, however, are perfect. Every small town has a grocery store where you can pick up bread, cheese, mayo or miracle whip, and veggies (I like tomatoes and cucumbers). Generally, you can pick up enough for quite a few meals for not much money.

You can make sandwiches with very little preparation. A knife (and maybe a plate) is all that’s required. They only take a couple minutes to assemble, and they’re much healthier than fast-food. Clean-up afterward only requires wiping off the knife.

One little caveat. Sandwiches are great for road trips where you have a cooler — in summer it keeps everything cool, and in winter it keeps things from freezing. For backpacking, I’d worry about the mayo or miracle whip going bad. If anyone has suggestions for how to avoid this, that would be amazing. I’d leave out the spread, but then the sandwiches would be quite dry, and I can’t stand that. But when I’m backpacking I usually don’t mind taking longer to make a meal, and the Lipton packs are great for that.

Travel — 1 Comment
30
Sep 07

Sleeping in the Car

Am I naive? This summer I’ve been on lots of excursions to the mountains by myself, and I usually sleep in my car. I find some quiet forested side road or turn off, park the car, lock the doors, fold down the back seat and sleep with my legs sticking into the trunk. It’s quite comfortable, the car is old enough that’s it’s not airtight while still not having large enough rust holes to let the mosquitoes in. Then I can wake up at dawn, and get anywhere I want quickly enough that I can take pictures in the early morning light. It really works out quite nicely. No problems.

So now I’m thinking of going on a road trip to Yellowstone. I haven’t been to the states in ages, so I was reading up about longer road trips. I started reading Road Trip America, which is a really valuable site by the way – especially the forums. So I started reading about people sleeping in cars, which seems quite natural to me. Apparently not so to most people. I had to laugh when I read about the dangers of sleeping in your car. People seem really scared in the states. One place even talked about the possibility of private property owners shooting at you. And this seemed to be justified to them. But then I got to thinking, is it really that dangerous in the states? I can’t believe it’s that much different than here. Are people just more paranoid? Or am I just weird and do most Canadians see things the same way?

So anybody on Road Trip America who thought that it was ok to sleep in a car recommended only sleeping in a well-lit truck stop, and notifying the attendant so that they can keep an eye on you. This just seems backwards to me. Then you’re sleeping in a grungy parking lot, surrounded by traffic, with artificial lights blinding you. I would much rather find a quiet gravel road in the country, where you can watch the stars and fall asleep to the sound of wind in the trees, or crickets chirping. And what danger is there? Are there nefarious criminals patrolling backroads, looking for all the poor saps dumb enough to think they’re safe in their vehicle? And what, would they just shoot me, and then break into my car to get at the trail mix? Or maybe they want my sleeping bag to sell on the black market.

So tell me – is this a real danger or are people paranoid?