Friday: Road-Trip Cooler Strategy, a Very Civilized Chipotle Stop & Dinner at Bonefish

Got up this morning and made a fresh batch of bacon for everyone.

We had bacon, Costco bagels and a solid breakfast before getting everything loaded up for our girls’ trip.

And then I dealt with what might be one of the most important pieces of road-trip planning:

The food cooler.

No Hotel Refrigerator-Cooler Strategy

Our hotel this weekend doesn’t have a refrigerator, which changed how I packed the cooler.

Normally I love freezer packs, but freezer packs are only useful until they thaw. If I don’t have a freezer at the hotel, I can’t refreeze them for tomorrow.

So this time I skipped them completely and used ice in Ziploc bags.

I packed the cooler with baggies of ice this morning and brought extra gallon-size Ziploc bags with me. At the hotel, I can dump the melted ice and refill the bags from the hotel ice machine.

That means I can keep refreshing the cooler throughout the entire weekend instead of having ice packs that are basically useless after Day One.

I do, of course, keep an eye on the temperature of the cooler because we’re talking about perishable food here. But as long as I can keep replenishing the ice, this should work really well.

What’s in the Road-Trip Cooler

I wasn’t trying to pack actual meals as much as I wanted plenty of substantial cold snacks available.

I brought cut-up fruit and vegetables, cheese sticks, mozzarella balls, lots of sliced homemade summer sausage, cooked chicken because I will absolutely just snack on plain chicken, and individual hummus packets.

Then I have a whole separate collection of things that don’t need to stay cold:

Bars.

Nuts.

Pretzels.

Peanut butter.

Basically, if we’re hungry at the hotel or in the car, we have options without needing to go find food every single time.

How Exactly Do You Road Trip With Fine China?

Then there was the other important packing consideration.

We’re going to Replacements, Ltd. to shop for fine china.

Which raised the obvious question:

If we buy a bunch of dishes, how exactly are we getting them home?

Our current strategy involves two empty laundry baskets that I brought from home.

My mom brought boxes, packing paper and tissue paper.

Once we see what we actually buy, we’ll wrap everything up and build our own little china transportation system for the drive home.

I feel like arriving at a fine-china sale with empty laundry baskets really sets the tone for this trip.

We’re ready.

A Very Civilized Chipotle Stop

Once we got on the road, we stopped at Chipotle for lunch.

And we didn’t just grab the food and immediately get back into the car.

Oh no.

We sat down.

Inside.

And ate our entire lunch.

Because, at least in my experience, there’s something about road-tripping with husbands and fathers that makes the entire trip feel like a race against an invisible clock.

How quickly can we get there?

How short can this bathroom stop possibly be?

Do we really need to sit down to eat?

Meanwhile, three generations of women on a road trip decided:

Yes.

Yes, we do.

We ate our Chipotle. We took our time. Then we got back in the car.

Easy breezy.

Dinner at Bonefish Grill

After more driving, we finally made it to Greensboro, checked into the hotel and headed back out for dinner at Bonefish Grill.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually eaten there before, and it was pretty good.

I ordered one of the salads with grilled shrimp and decided to add an additional shrimp skewer.

Excellent decision.

Without the extra shrimp, it would have been a pretty small entrée salad for me.

And really, we all know what’s happening here:

The salad is merely the delivery system for the shrimp.

My girls also really liked the bread with the olive oil dipping sauce, so dinner was a success.

Tomorrow: Replacements

And that’s Day One.

We made it to Greensboro.

The cooler is packed.

The hotel ice machine is about to become an integral part of my food-storage system.

The empty laundry baskets are ready for their fine-china destiny.

And tomorrow morning we’re headed to the Replacements, Ltd. yard sale and then inside to explore.

There’s a little rain in the forecast, so we’ll see what that does to the yard-sale portion of the adventure.

But rain or shine, we’re going to look at a truly unreasonable number of dishes.

Exactly what we came for.