If you’re planning an adventurous holiday with sightseeing and activities every day, you’ll need to eat the right foods to give your body the fuel it needs.
Here are some tips to make healthy eating possible while on the road.
Be smart with food storage
A car fridge is essential if you are going off-road or embarking on long day trips. Even though we have a bigger caravan fridge, it’s easy to access food straight from the car when we stop for lunch or if we want a snack, without having to pop up the caravan. By installing a small car fridge, we can keep butter, milk, eggs, meat, fresh fruit and vegetables at the ready for whenever we need them.
Only a few weeks into our trip we attracted mice into our car, so now we store all food in thick plastic tubs. Drew built a drawer next to the fridge to store cooking items such as saucepans, plates and cutlery. When the car is parked, we also put up a reflective shade to keep food out of direct sunlight as much as possible.
Cook your own food and know what to buy
Preparing and cooking our own food has come to be one of the best parts of our Aussie road trip adventure. However, in order to create delicious and fresh meals, you have to have your wits about you. Make sure you stock up on as many fresh fruits, vegetables and meats as you can when you can – you don’t always know when the next town pit stop will be!
It’s also a good idea to stock up on long-life staples that’ll last well after the fresh produce is eaten. Items such as canned soup, two-minute noodles and other packaged foods can be lifesavers when out on the road.
To keep our costs down, we’ve been buying fresh fruit and veg that are in season, meat that is on special, and creating meals with what we have on hand. We’ve also been lucky enough to catch some fresh fish straight from the ocean.
Don’t let anything go to waste
Cook everything you have! Just because a fruit isn’t ripe yet or a vegetable is bruised, it doesn’t mean it should go to waste. We’ve been making simple banana pancakes with overripe bananas, stewing up tomatoes that have been bruised to make a pasta sauce, and chucking leftovers into a one-pot risotto.
Remember, when you’re on a big road trip you need to eat what is practical, rather than simply what you might feel like at the time.
Pay attention to quarantine laws
It pays to research quarantine laws that stipulate which foods you can and can’t take across borders before you leave.
We almost had to throw away a large portion of fresh food crossing from Victoria to South Australia because apparently you legally cannot take any fruit (unless cooked) or leafy green vegetables across a border. We got around this by stewing up our leftover fruit the night before so we could still eat it when we arrived in South Australia.
Be realistic when it comes to electrical products
If you’re planning on cooking everything in a microwave or using a coffee machine on a daily basis, be sure to camp in powered sites, or have your own reliable power supply. We have learnt to cook pretty effectively without our mod cons, but we still have them at the ready for when we splash out on a powered site.
Drew and Court are a Melbourne couple who are travelling around Australia for the next 10 months. They’ll be writing about their experiences for Without a Hitch, giving us the real story of life on the road.
In their next article, Drew & Court discuss the spares for maintenance and repairs that will be accompanying them on their big lap around Australia.
