The Great Wander

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Leaving Sand Dunes National Park, we headed west to Mesa Verde National Park and the Durango area.  I don’t know that words or pictures can describe the awe that I experienced when I saw the engineering feats of the indigenous populations from 800 years ago.  I think about the houses that I have remodeled, and I wonder if those structures will still be around in 100 years.  Maybe, most of them will likely be there, but 800 years from now…I don’t imagine much of what I see today will be around in 800 years.  It’s amazing to see the structures that were constructed still standing.  Apparently, there was some restoration done to the structures in the early twentieth century, but overall, what’s there is what was there 800 years ago. 

On to the real topic of the post…eating healthy while traveling. We still eat out on occasion.  One of the things that we are getting better at is planning easy meals for the end of a day of travel, but if we are in a hotel, we are likely to eat out.  Especially if we can find a dog friendly restaurant.  Bring Fido is a great app for that.  We’ve had pretty good luck.  But we really don’t want to eat out a lot.  So, there’s planning involved.

We have a couple of crates of basic foods that were in our pantry.  Anything perishable goes in the cooler and as needed, we drain the water and add ice.  When we plan our menu, there are two considerations. First, what are we doing that day.  If we have a hard day of traveling and visiting in a park, we are going to go easier prep so that we can cook it on a picnic table in the park and not have a lot of clean up.  The second consideration is what we would consider healthy.

When we finished up at Cliff Palace, we headed back to camp to cook.  We knew that day wasn’t going to be too stressful, so we had a little more prep for the meal.  That night we had a chicken stir fry.  Vegetables were precut at the grocery store, so that made things a little bit easier.  The chicken breasts I cut up and seasoned with our spices.  We keep a set of basic spices in our action packer along with the rest of our kitchen gear. 

We have a great cast iron Dutch Oven/skillet that we use for most everything. I know ideally, you would do a stir fry in a wok, but the skillet works.  What works really well is that we have a Coleman grill that folds up and fits nicely in the back of the SUV.  It runs on a 1lb propane bottle, so on an as needed basis we replace that.  You don’t have to have a big propane bottle for this, the 1lb is the only way I saw to connect it to propane. 

So what do we consider ‘healthy’? we try to minimize processed foods.  Fresh vegetables, unprocessed meats, e.g., chicken breasts, steaks, things like that.  Occasionally, even though it’s a bit more processed, we will buy some frozen cod or tilapia to make fish tacos.  That might not be the healthiest, but it’s better than eating fast food.

As I said, we look at what are we doing that day, does it need to be fast and appealing or do we have more prep time.  For instance, the day we drove from Sand Dunes to Mesa Verde, we planned fast and appealing.  We bought some of the Knorr alfredo noodles and canned chicken breast.  We had the milk, the butter, and the water at camp, while two of us were setting up the tent, the other one was pulling out our little two burner stove to start the water, milk, and butter for noodles.  Was that the healthiest choice, probably not.  But again, we didn’t have to eat out and that’s been part of the goal.

Grocery shopping is also much more focused.  When we get to the boat, that will change a little bit, because we will be doing a mass provisioning for the boat.  But in the car, we have to keep things pretty tight in terms of what we buy.  We don’t have a 7’ fridge/freezer to fill up.  We have a cooler, and a 2x3x1.5 crate that is our food storage.  So, you plan carefully and think about keeping the food as close to the source as possible.

Doing things that way makes a world of difference, we can already tell that we are feeling better because we aren’t loading up on a bunch of excess sugar.  Do we still get a Freal at a gas station for a treat, yeah, we do, but it’s much less than it ever was before.