Here’s What’s In Our Travel Pantry

A couple of days ago I asked if you had any questions about anything relating to our road trip for when I put together our FAQs page. There’s still time to submit your questions, so comment on this post if there’s anything you’d like to know.

Some of the questions we’ve been asked can be answered in a sentence or two, so those are straightforward enough. There were some questions which take a little more explaining though, so I thought it’d be helpful to answer those in separate posts which I can then link to from the FAQs.

Beth asked several questions, one of which was:

What is typically in your take-along travel pantry? I think that you have written a little bit about this already, but an outline of what essential staples you tote along would be great.

This is a great question because eating on the road is one of the hardest aspects of the road trip. We travel in a 2004 Toyota Corolla rather than an RV (here’s why), so we have limited space for food and kitchen supplies. I’ve written before about our portable travel kitchen which enables us to make meals in hotel rooms even where there’s no kitchen, but had never really addressed the food side of things.

Food Box

We have two main parts to our travel pantry. The first is our food box which is exactly as it sounds.

Yep, no expense spared here at No Home Just Roam! It’s just a reused box with tape holding it together and missing two of its top flaps. It’s still pretty sturdy though and does its job.

As for what’s in it, that depends. Up until recently on the road trip, we’ve tried to keep our food supplies pretty minimal seeing as we have limited space in the car. I took the photo below a few months ago when we stayed at the Residence Inn Jackson Ridgeland in Mississippi as the kitchen in our suite had enough cupboard space to unpack the box. Usually though, all the food remains in the box.

The photo above is reasonably representative of what’s usually in our food box. Here’s a quick list though of what you can usually find in there:

• Couple of cans of soup
• Couple of cans of green beans
• Pasta sauce
• Pasta
• Garlic mashed potato packet
• Quinoa and/or cous cous
• Tuna (both cans and packets)
• Oil spray
• Seasonings (salt, pepper, chili flakes, etc.)
• Popcorn
• Teabags
• Rice
• Granola bars
• A few other odds and ends
• My travel electric kettle (in its own box it takes up about 1/8 of the food box)

As mentioned above, we’ve always kept our food supplies fairly minimal due to space constraints, especially seeing as we don’t often have the luxury of unpacking the food box. Due to COVID-19 though, our travel plans have changed for the foreseeable future. Rather than moving every 5-7 days, we’re planning on staying in the same place for a month at a time which will likely be the case for the next few months at least.

We’re therefore booking places that have a full kitchen which in turns means we have cupboard space. We’re currently staying at an Airbnb in Pueblo, CO, so here’s what our unpacked pantry looks like now that we can stock up on more food than usual.

Don’t worry – we’re not just living on canned and packaged food! The Airbnb has a full-sized fridge-freezer, so we have plenty of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat to complement what’s in the cupboards.

Travel Cooler

In addition to our food box containing canned and package goods, we also have a travel cooler. No matter where we stay, I always ensure we have – at the very least – a mini fridge in our room.

Seeing as we tend to move every week or so, we try to only buy the fresh food we need once we arrive at the next hotel or Airbnb. That helps minimize wastage, plus I have a better idea as to how big (or small) the mini fridge is which affects how much fresh food I’ll buy at the grocery store.

Although we have several small freezer packs, it’s not always possible to refreeze them as mini fridges often don’t contain a freezer compartment. That therefore limits how long food will be good for after being out of the fridge as we head to our next place. Sometimes we’ll improvise by putting ice from the hotel’s ice machine in Ziploc bags, but that’s not ideal.

By the time moving day comes along, we’ve usually eaten down our fresh food supplies. What’s left is usually open bottles of sauces – ranch dressing, salad dressing, mayonnaise, mustard, BBQ sauce, cocktail sauce, etc. There’ll often be a few cans of soda, a packet or two of sandwich meat, along with an open pack of tortilla wraps, maybe half a red onion, etc.

Snacks

I said earlier that we have two main parts to our travel pantry which is our food box and travel cooler. There’s a miscellaneous third part though which is our snack supply. After all, you can’t be on a road trip and not have snacks!

The number of snacks we have come moving day depends on how overzealous I’ve been while at the grocery store. Usually though we have a shopping bag or two containing snacks which include candy bars, potato chips, maybe some cereal or granola bars that don’t fit in the food box, etc. If the journey to our next location is longer, I try to fit the candy in the travel cooler so that it doesn’t melt in the car when we stop somewhere for lunch or do something along the way.

Alcohol

While it’s not part of the travel pantry per se, I figured I should also mention that we tend to have a separate box containing alcohol. This isn’t as bad as it might sound though! I tend to drink whiskey nowadays and buy a large bottle as that works out much cheaper over time, so that takes up some of the space. Kroger and its affiliate stores sometimes offer a 10-20% discount when buying six bottles of wine, so I’ll sometimes stock up on those to save money as wine is what Shae usually drinks. Similarly, Total Wine sometimes emails me 20% off coupons when buying six bottles, so we sometimes stock up there instead.

Needless to say though, that gives us more to transport seeing as I’m not going to polish off a giant bottle of whiskey within five days, nor is Shae going to get through half a dozen bottles of wine in that time. The alcohol box also carries our bottle opener and several glasses. Although we try to keep things minimized, we’ve picked up a few glasses along the way when visiting breweries, wineries and distilleries on our road trip. Some hotels only provide disposable coffee cups and/or small plastic cups, so it’s much nicer having our own drinking glasses we can use, which is why we end up needing a box for all this.

Final Thoughts

So that’s what our travel pantry consists of. The fact that we’re staying in the same place for a month at a time at the moment means it’s a little different right now. However, when our road trip starts getting back to normal, we’ll have to start minimizing what’s in our food box, travel cooler, etc.