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Building a “road kitchen” for our Mini Cooper that fits in alongside our suitcases and the supplies for Neil’s mobile office has turned out to be a fun challenge on our road trip.  These 3 tips are the best tricks we’ve worked out for making our road kitchen efficient, effective, and hopefully fool-proof.

Tip #1: How to select the right cooler for YOUR trip

No one else can tell you what equipment is right for the trip that you’re taking.  Unfortunately, there’s just no universal answer.  And nobody had a pre-fab answer for us when it came to buying a cooler for the Mini.

The best way we’ve found to research equipment:

1. Make a list of  the constraints or limiting factors. (Including budget!) In other words, the non-negotiable criteria.
2. Make a separate list of features or options we’d like to include if we can, but that are not essential. In other words, the bonus list or negotiable criteria.

(We have great success following these steps for making any kind of significant purchase, not just travel gear.  For big ticket items, we also make sure to get at least 3 competitive quotes.)

Going on a long road trip in our Mini Cooper makes it vital that we use our limited storage space efficiently. Any time we consider buying new equipment for the trip, we measure the utility of the item against how much space it takes up and how much weight it adds to the car.

When we researched which cooler to buy for this trip, the need for low weight, compact size, and high function dictated our non-negotiable criteria:

• Cooler can’t waste space with thick walls or a bulky lid.
• Cooler should “disappear” when it is not in use.
• Cooler should still hold “enough” food to be useful.

We chose up a “California Innovations 36 Can Collapsible Cooler With Easy Access Lid” at the Gander Mountain outdoor supplies store north of Richmond.

• The cooler’s high density thermal insulation makes the walls thin and soft.
• The cooler collapses down to take up about 60% less space when empty.
• The cooler dimensions (13.50″ x 11.25″ x 11.62″) let it fit easily in the well of the hatchback. We discovered today that it holds exactly one paper bag worth of groceries.

There are just two of us on the trip, and we’re happy to make frequent provisioning stops along the way.  In fact, we are looking forward to shopping at road side stands and farmers’ markets. One  bag of perishable food at a time is plenty for us.

Our verdict: following these steps to select the right cooler helped us buy a cooler that is “just right” for our needs.

Tip #2: How to fit more food into your cooler

Our cooler is clearly too small to fill up with ice!

When we’ve previously gone on day trips or weekend trips (before this road trip), we’ve frozen plastic water bottles the night before we left to throw in the cooler as ice.  Once they thaw we either drink them up or refreeze them to use again.

The problem is: we don’t have room in our cozy cooler for frozen ice bottles if we want to fit in much food.  And not every place we stay has a freezer, so we may not be able to freeze the water over night. Plus, we’re doing our best to avoid plastic and disposable items on this trip.

Then Neil came up with a brilliant solution:

Cool the food with frozen fruit.

Frozen fruit is essentially edible ice. We buy a pack or two of frozen fruit and throw it in the cooler with the food.  When the fruit thaws, we can eat it at night for desert, or for breakfast the next morning.  And, if we want to cool a drink during the day (we’re experimenting with brewing iced tea in the car), we can just pop in a few frozen berries as ice cubes. Plus the small particles of frozen fruit make it literally more flexible than a gel pack or a frozen bottle of water: we can mold the frozen fruit around rigid objects in the cooler so it wastes less space.

The only drawbacks to this method so far are that we need to make sure we get to local grocery stores before they close at night to stock up on frozen fruit.  And, while it feels silly to buy frozen fruit in the summer when so much fresh fruit is available, we’re making sure to eat lots of fresh fruit, too, and buy frozen fruit that is out of season to increase the variety of our diets.

Tip #3: How to make sure you don’t leave your cooler behind

We really don’t want to drive miles down the road only to realize that we left our cooler behind in the last rest stop (or in the last state).  We can both get a little dopey when we’ve driven for a long time or when we’ve put off eating (okay, I’m much worse for this than Neil is), so we don’t want to rely on memory or luck to make sure everything makes it back in the car.

When we bought the cooler (and our other equipment for the trip, too), instead of looking for “pretty” colours or “nice” designs, we’ve tried to buy things in hazard hues: hunter orange, road sign yellow, danger red.

We really don’t have a penchant for flourescent colours.  (Or for 80′s Euro-pop, thanks for asking.)

What we have is an allergy to camouflage.

We didn’t want equipment that would be drab, or unobtrusive, or similar in colour to asphault or picnic tables or browning lawns.  We wanted obnoxiously bright gear that stands up and yells: “Yo! Don’t drive away without me.”

Fashion statements are all well and good, but we’ll take function over form any day.

Neil is an an exceptionally good load master and he hasn’t left anything behind yet, but we also both prefer to set up systems and protocols to make life easier.  We both like the fact that our bright coloured gear is shortens the odds in our favour.

. . .

To recap, our 3 best cooler tips are:

1. Use rational shopping tricks to pick a cooler that works for your specific needs.
2. Don’t waste space on ice: cool your food with frozen food packs.
3. Choose obnoxious colours so you can’t overlook your cooler.

Will these cooler tips work for you? As with all the advice on our site, your mileage may vary. If you try out any of our tips, we’d love to hear how they do or don’t work out for you.

And, we’d love to hear your best suggestions for making the most of road trip coolers.  Please share!

We arrived safe and sound late last night in the Baltimore, Maryland suburb of Owings Mills to visit our friend Patrick.

We’ll be house sitting for Patrick the next week or so, and actually visiting with him when he gets back from his own travels. But at least we arrived in time to drop him off at the airport today!

The last week has been incredibly busy, and we’re looking forward to sitting down and writing up our most recent adventures now that we have a fixed address for a few days again and a chance to breathe.

Update If you can recommend sights / events / things-to-do in the Baltimore / DC area, or if you’re a long-lost friend hiding here under our noses and you’d like to get in touch, please leave a comment.  We’d love to hear from you!

I’d like to congratulate Katy Quissell & Kim Mance on their launch this week of Galivanting, a brand new women’s travel magazine and online community.

When I got started traveling this kind of information just didn’t exist online.  (Back then to get online you had to be a university scientist or work for the military, and you were dialing up by placing your rotary handset on an acoustic coupler.) I remember going through the reference section of the library to find lists of government publications about studying and working abroad, mailing away for them, and then working my way through the bibliographies in those booklets to send away for more publications, ad infinitum.

(It is remarkable what you can find out if you are persistent.)

I wish I’d had access to a site like Galivanting then, and I’ll be keeping an eye on their site during this trip for their pointers to women-owned businesses, like the Chicago Chocolate Tour.  (I think that link may be enough for us to add Chicago to our itinerary.) I aslo love the fact that, instead of being yet another condescending and fluffy magazine that’s just a thin pretext to sell a mixture of insecurity and garbage products to women, Galivanting combines useful information with a refreshingly feminist perspective.

I have to thank them also for being the first big travel site to link back to us at Your Milage May Vary! When I pointed out a few nits on the Galivanting guide to Canada, Kim not only made the corrections, she was also kind enough to give me credit and link to YMMV.  I’m really impressed with their class and their responsiveness.  Thank you for the link love, ladies! (If you are a new visitor arriving by way of Galivanting, welcome and please make yourself at home!)

I’ve done my best to put the gal into galivanting over the years myself, too: I feel like I’ve found some kindred spirits.  I really wish Kim and Katy well, and I look forward to watching Galivanting develop.

Update I want to add that Galivanting pays for travel articles! I know so many talented writers, especially bloggers, who make little or nothing but deserve to be paid for their work–if you’re not a blogger, you might not appreciate just how exciting the prospect of paid work can be.  I’ve already shared the news with some girlfriends who are traveling right now and they are all excited about submitting their stories and travel tips.  If you’re a woman traveler, consider sending your travel advice for other women to Galivanting.

And yes, before anyone (meaning Ian or Janet or my mom) asks: I promise to send Galivanting some articles too.

I’ve been reading some travel blogs today looking for travel tips (I’ll share the good ones in due course) and came across an interesting thread on Vagabonding asking How did people react when you told them you were leaving? (that is continued on the BootsnAll Travel Boards).

The most heartbreaking reaction we had was from the gentleman who bought out (other) car just days before we left town.  A local Richmonder, he responded with, “Oh, so I guess you must hate Richmond.”

Ouch!

In fact, I want to make it clear that we’ve had a great time living in Richmond and our reasons for this trip aren’t a negative reflection of our feelings about Richmond at all.

On the other hand, almost everyone else, from friends to total strangers (including the wife of the guy who bought our car), have been really excited about the trip.  We’ve been surprised by the outpouring of encouragement and support, and the sheer enthusiasm, especially from Neil’s coworkers back at the cube farm.  (The offers of places to stay from friends and family across the country have been awfully nice, too.)  It has been really fun to see people so excited and happy about our trip.  Now we feel like we have standards to live up to!

Another common reaction has been: “Well, you’ll be blogging the trip, won’t you?” or “Then you’ll have to blog the trip!”  I’ve been surprised by how many people have brought up blogging it.  I was on the fence about whether or not to write up the trip, but in the face of popular demand, we figured we’d better do it. (We are here to serve. )

We’ve also had a several people offer to come with us.  If the Mini weren’t already bursting at the seams, we’d take you all along, too.  In the absence of more passenger room, I hope the blog will suffice as a vicarious experience. Your milage may vary.

The 3 toughest questions we’ve been asked so far by people we meet on the road are:

1. Where are you from?
2. Where are you going?
3. What is the trip all about?

1. Where are you from is a tough question because Neil grew up in an Air Force family, I’ve traveled abroad for school and work, we’ve had 17 addresses in our marriage of 7 1/2 years, and between the two of us we’ve lived in 2 provinces, 6 states, 7 countries, 3 continents, and we’ve traveled in oodles of others. (Other people collect stamps, we collect geography.) We are most recently from Richmond, Virginia: if anyone wants a more precise answer, we’d better sit them down and put the kettle on.

2. Where are you going is a tough question because, as Neil wrote earlier, we’re taking the scenic route to nowhere in particular. At least, we don’t have a set time frame, a set route, or a solidly set final destination. And what we think we’ve got figured out so far we fully expect to change while we’re on the road.

3. What is the trip all about is aneasier question to answer, even if the answer is a little complicated.

Seizing the Day
We’ve always wanted to travel together. We got engaged on a road trip on Neil’s old Suzuki Bandit (motorcycle), and we’ve just kept on trucking ever since.

When Neil became a full-time telecommuter this spring, we jumped at the chance to put the trip together and work from the road while we travelled around exploring the country. We really don’t expect to see gasoline prices drop in the near future, either, so we’ve both felt like either we make this trip right now or we might not be able to afford to do it later on. (We’d love to be wrong on this point!)

Fleeing the Heat
We’ve had 4 1/2 great years in Richmond. Unfortunately, the heat and humidity (and the collateral mold and fungus crops) have posed some real challenges for my health. And July and August are the muggiest, moldiest months of the Richmond calendar, which I typically spend living under virtual house arrest.

While we would have enjoyed a little more time to prepare for the trip, we scrambled to get on the road as fast as possible so we could avoid the Richmond summer. Our initial plan is to head to Maine, or somewhere similarly cool for the summer, and then start driving some serious miles in the fall when the rest of the country cools off.

We’re hoping that in our travels we’ll find somewhere with four seasons of mold-free, healthy weather that works for us.

Finding a Home
This trip is more about the journey than the destination, but our ultimate goal, to the extent we have one, is to find somewhere new to make our home base.

We’ve hopped around the continent throughout our marriage chasing jobs and opportunities, but so far we haven’t made deliberate choices about where we wanted to be.  This is our big chance to chose our home.

So far our criteria boil down to looking for a place that offers healthy, sustainable, affordable living:

• Arid climate
• Temperate climate (in the subjective sense of “temperate enough for us”)
• Outside hazardous weather zones (tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, etc.)
• Good air quality
• Walkable: preferably a walkable city, but even a good walkable neighbourhood will do
• Good public transportation
• Local food production
• Local water supply
• Reasonable cost of living

The shorter version: Vancouver, British Columbia without the rain (and with more affordable housing).

To some extent, the perfect home is like art: we’ll know it when we see it. And whether or not we find it, we fully intend to enjoy the adventure of looking for it.

If you think you know a good location that fits these criteria, speak up! We’re open to all suggestions.

I am queueing up some road trip movies in our Netflix account, and I would love your suggestions to add to our list.

On my list so far are:

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World(1963) G

Before literally kicking the bucket when his car careens over an embankment, “Smiler” Grogan (Jimmy Durante) tells onlookers he’s stashed $350,000 in stolen loot beneath “the big W” in the town of Santa Rosita, and thus begins a mad dash to recover the dough.

What an amazing collection of talent: Spencer Tracey, Milton Berle, Sid Cesar, Buddy Hackett, Ethel Merman, Mickey Rooney, Dick Shawn, Phil Silvers, Terry-Thomas, Jonathan Winters, Jim Bakus, Peter Falk, Normal Fell, Buster Keaton, Don Knotts, Carl Reiner, Jack Benny, and even an uncredited cameo by Jerry Lewis (as “Man who runs over hat”).

If our trip includes “a big W” we’ll let you know once we’ve dug up and re-stashed the loot.

The Blues Brothers: Theatrical Cut(1980) R

After Jake Blues (John Belushi) gets out of prison, he and brother Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) reunite for a one-night charity concert, then wind up in a monumental chase.

This is not a good movie, but it still manages to be a great movie. (I should point out, before Neil does, that Dan Aykroyd is Canadian, too.) I still love the soundtrack and the church scene with James Brown is one of my favourite movie scenes (right up there with “I am Spartacus!”).

The Cannonball Run (1981) PG

Burt Reynolds, Farrah Fawcett, Dom DeLuise, Peter Fonda, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Jackie Chan are all entrants in an illegal cross-country car race, and all are willing to do anything to win.

I’m not sure how Blues Brothers wound up rated R while Cannonball Run was rated PG. I recall Cannonball Run as being in distinctly poorer taste.

I haven’t seen Cannonball Run in dog’s years, and I’m guessing that what I’ll delicately term its “1970′s sensibilities” are probably a little uncomfortable to watch today. (Has anyone seen it lately?) But Cannonball Run makes the list because it is still an ultimate road trip movie. I remember loving Dom DeLuise in this film, and I think this must have been Jackie Chan’s first big American movie role.

Strangers in Good Company (1990) PG

When a bus filled with eight elderly women breaks down in the wilderness, the group of strangers is stranded at a deserted farmhouse with only their wits, their memories and eventually some roasted frogs’ legs to sustain them.

Rita Kemply of the Washington Post characterized Strangers In Good Company as Outward Bound on Golden Pond, and that strikes me as a pretty good description. I saw this in Montreal back when it was released, and found it interesting and sweet but also substantial. Given that their bus breaks down, I don’t know if this is strictly speaking a “road trip movie” Kemply calls it “a kind of road movie sitting still” but then we haven’t been logging that many miles yet ourselves so I’m not really in a position to point fingers.

Strangers in Good Company was produced by Studio D of Canada’s National Film Board, which is now tragically defunct. A film came out in 2007 about the history of Studio D, and Gail Vanstone of York University also recently published a book titled D is for Daring: The Women behind the Films of Studio D. I look forward to tracking down both the book and the film.

(If I keep including Canadian content, do you think Stephen Harper will send me some grant money?)

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) R

Convinced little Olive (Abigail Breslin) is beauty queen material, parents Richard (Greg Kinnear) and Sheryl (Toni Collette) and the rest of the family embark on a life-altering road trip to a pageant.

Several friends recommended Little Miss Sunshine to us, but I dragged my feet on watching it because the trailers and promotions for it did nothing for me. When we finally watched it, I was delightfully surprised by how quirky and subversive it is. (That’s high praise from us.) Without spoiling the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, I’d just like to clarify that Neil and I are not traveling with any dead bodies in the Mini. So far.

What are your favourite road trip movies?

As I look at this list, it occurs to me that many road trip movies are of dubious quality; this genre seems prone to movies that, while great as road trip movies, are not necessarily good as just plain movies. So be sure to explain your favourite road trip movies’ redeeming qualities!

And don’t feel constrained to American movies or English language films. There’s got to be some great road trip movies from other regions, and I’m surprised I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Please share your favourites!

My mom likes to call my brother and I “upsidedown cakes” when we do something completely backwards.  Neil’s mom calls her kids “wrong-way Wooten.”

Well, the Moms sure have us pegged.

After approximately 202 miles of driving, tonight we are right back where we started, in Richmond, Virginia.

Neil has 2 days of training in the office this week, so we drove down I-95 this afternoon, staying just a few yards ahead of thunder storms and torrential downpours all the way.

But, we don’t have a home any more, so for the next few nights we’re staying at the Quality Inn (and not, as our friend Janet feared, a “no-tell motel”).

The good news is that we get one more shot to visit Richmond friends, eat at some of our favourite Richmond places, and take all the pictures we meant to take but ran out of time.  Plus, we can fine tune just what goes in the storage unit and what goes in the car.

And, we can give our moms a chance to laugh at us for being wrong-way Wootens and upsidedown cakes.

We should have the show back on the road by late in the week.

Errata
Neil’s mom has emailed us a correction:

I never heard of “Wrong-way Wooten”,  but when we lived in Florida we used to go to the stock car races and there was a young driver named Boaty Boatwright and he would spin out all the time and he would always end up going backwards.  They called him “Wrong-way Boatwright”.  I would call the kids Wrong-way Boatwright because of him.
Mumsy

Yes, we do have a plan.

Sort of.

In point of fact, our plan basically is ‘to avoid the weather.’ You’re familiar with storm-chasers? We’re the opposite. (Will heat-fleeing tours catch on? Stay tuned!)

Richmond is hot and steamy in the summer, so we don’t want to be there, then. So after quite a bit of demographic surveys, 50-yr weather profiles, and general research, we’ve settled on a soft target of Albuquerque. On the other hand, neither of us have ever actually been to Albuquerque, so how good it is remains to be seen—although it looks spectacular.

Traveling across the southwest in August is roughly as appealing as remaining in Richmond, so we’ve decided to take the scenic route.

Maine.

Maine looks very welcoming for the summer, so we’re hoping to spend some time up there (or at least, in the New England area, wherever the weather and Internet are good).

In the fall, we will sort of meander from New England across to (eventually) New Mexico via St. Louis, Kansas City, Minnesota, Denver, Boulder, and anywhere else that sounds interesting along the way.

We should get to Albuquerque around November. Possibly this November. After that, it’s Groundhog Day—we stick our heads up, and if we don’t like our shadows, we take a left turn (a left turn at Albuquerque is crucial) and it’s two more weeks of driving. Somewhere.

So yes, we do have a plan.

Sort of.

Just a quick annotation on Neil’s last post, “What comes after Fourth.” The title makes an (obscure) allusion to a comic routine by early 20th century British music hall comedian “Monsewer” Eddie Gray, who was known for his trademark “Cockney-French” where he spoke on the stage in very bad French.

One can only imagine that this played very well to British audiences between the wars! (Not that bad French accents seem to have ever gone out of style in British comedy.)

We saw a clip not long ago of Monsewer Eddie in a stage performance that I believe dates to the 1920′s.  He boasts about how his somewhat dim assistant can speak German, and the assistant counts out loud up to five:

Assistant: Eins, Zwei, Drei, Fier, Fünf.

Monsewer Eddie: What comes after Fünf?

Assistant: Fünf und half!

The facts that Neil and I both have a soft spot for vaudville-style comedy, and that Monsewer Eddie also somehow reminds us of Neil’s dad, makes him extra delightful to us. (Your mileage may vary.)

And thus the correct answer to “What comes after Fourth?” would be: “Fourth and a half!”

I couldn’t track down the Fünf-und-half routine, but here is a clip from what looks to be the same performance.

If you need to know what’s a henway, or what’s a grecian urn, you know where to reach us.

We survived the Fourth of July, stayed off the roads, and went to see fireworks on the lake with friends and friends of friends. We were rained out by rolling thunderstorms but the cheesecake was worth it and a good time was had by all.

We’re staying around here for a short while because the weather is amenable, and we’re trading gourmet food and a room for fixing every printer/computer that wanders past. Quite the bargain for us: install a virus scanner, get a room; defrag a hard drive, get breakfast. Perhaps there could be a labor book that college students could use to determine how much their labors are worth. Installing a printer? Book time on that is dinner and one appetizer. Aligning the (printer) heads gets dessert.

Anything on Vista rates pizza and beer.