Roll Down the Window and Let the Wind Blow Back Your Hair

by Lindsay Miller

Summer is the best time for road trips! The highways are dry, the weather is beautiful, and all you need to do is throw your swimsuit and a novel in your backpack, hop in the car, and get ready to be amazed at how much money it’s actually possible to spend on gas in a single day. I’m a long-time veteran of road trips, and there are few things I cherish more in life than rolling down the window and popping in a mixed CD. (All road trip mixes need to contain at least one Springsteen song or I don’t even want to know what you’re doing with your life.)

There is one major drawback to any long trip, though, aside from getting a sunburn on one arm: the food. We all know how easy it is to eat horribly on the road. You get Pringles and a cherry Coke Slushie at one rest stop, and then the rest of the day becomes a blur of hunger/sugar high/sugar crash/more hunger (since you haven’t consumed anything resembling protein all day). By the time you stop at some crappy hotel where they tell you it’s a non-smoking room but it’s CLEARLY NOT, you’re headachy, cranky, vaguely nauseous yet still somehow starving, and it takes you three hours to get to sleep because of all the caffeine and other questionable substances you’ve ingested. Not exactly a great way to kick off your vacation.

My beloved and I road tripped to Albuquerque last month for their Pride Fest, where I performed a bunch of poems about being queer (and one about how much I love horror movies, which was less well-received). Because he, unlike me, is a responsible grown-up person, he anticipated the food problem beforehand and took steps to prevent it. We packed a cooler full of food that took almost no time to prepare and lasted us the whole weekend without a nasty junk-food hangover. For bonus points, with the money we saved on road food we had an actual nice dinner out while we were there.

So, if you have a small cooler and some kind of a bag, here’s how to avoid getting scurvy when you’re out on the road.

In the cooler:

 — Water bottle, which you can refill whenever you stop for gas

– Cheese. We packed a wedge of brie and some sliced extra-sharp white cheddar, which are the Default Cheeses in our house, but go with whatever sounds tastiest to you

– Strawberries. You don’t have to slice them or anything, just rinse them and stick them in the cooler

– A bag of baby carrots (plus other veggies — celery, broccoli florets, etc.)

– Hummus (recipe below)

– Fruit dip (recipe below)

In the bag:

 — Good sourdough bread. You can make your own if you’re extra fancy, but sourdough takes forever and we were busy finding our bathing suits, arranging a cat sitter, and cleaning our kitchen so the cat sitter wouldn’t be completely disgusted, so we just bought a loaf from Sunflower

– Apples and pears, however many you think you’ll eat. We packed like 10 of each, which was way too many, obviously. But they stay good for a long time if you don’t slice them up, so just stick however many you have left in the fridge when you get home

– A bag of hearty tortilla chips, whatever kind you prefer (I always go with blue corn)

– A paring knife wrapped in a towel

We don’t really use recipes in my house. My beloved, who does most of the cooking, prefers to improvise and throw in ingredients to taste, so there are no particular quantities attached to things. It’s a good excuse to sample the product every few minutes as you’re making it.

Awesome White Bean Hummus:
Throw a couple cans of white beans (you can use chickpeas if you want a more traditional hummus) in the food processor with a little olive oil, salt, and Italian seasonings. If you don’t have a good Italian seasoning blend, just throw in some of whatever sounds good from your spice rack — basil, oregano, thyme, pepper. Add several peeled cloves of garlic, some marinated artichoke hearts, and some roasted red pepper (the artichoke hearts and red pepper can both be found in jars on the same aisle where you buy olives — oh, maybe add some olives, if you’re into that). Taste it. Add a little more of whatever you don’t think you used enough of.

Super Easy Fruit Dip:
Take like half a container of sour cream and add about a half a teaspoon of vanilla extract. You can use some other kind of extract or flavoring if you want — we’ve tried maple and that was yummy. Then stir in powdered sugar a little at a time, tasting frequently, of course, until it’s as sweet as you want it. Dip a strawberry and eat it. Isn’t it awesome?! If you want to just eat it by the spoonful, I’m not going to judge you. OK, stop, save some for the car.

This food is mix ’n’ match, just like the clothes in your suitcase should be. Chips and hummus, strawberries and dip, a hummus and cheese sandwich, apples and brie … the choices are, well, not endless, but there are several of them. You won’t get bored and need to stop for nachos at the gas station (ew, that is not cheese). Oh, but let yourself have a treat at some point — curly fries, a frozen coffee-inspired Starbucks beverage — you are on vacation, after all.

Other pro tips: If you live in a state with obnoxious no-booze-in-the-grocery-store blue laws, you may waste a lot of time late at night driving around Albuquerque looking for a liquor store before you remember that you can just buy beer at the 7–11. (I miss living in Tucson and picking up a bottle of Cuervo every time I went to CVS, like a civilized person.) Of course, you can’t buy good beer at the 7–11, but how fancy are you, for real? You could also just bring a six-pack with you, if you didn’t save money by purchasing the smallest cooler you could find, like some of us. And they have those signs at the hotel saying “no glass bottles in the pool area” but come on, it’s not like they check.

If you have big plans for the second day of your trip — for instance, if you’re going to spend the day outside in the sun, getting dehydrated while right-wing fundamentalists try to convince you to renounce your sinful ways — you should definitely have sex the first night, when you get to the hotel. You’ll get a better night’s sleep and be bright and energetic for your busy day tomorrow! Plus, you’re totally not gonna want to do it the next night, because you’ll be sunburned (no matter how many times you re-apply sunscreen, goddammit) and exhausted. And you drove all this way, and you’re paying good money for this hotel, and you are going to have hotel sex. Make sure you put the lube in a plastic bag, and then put that bag in another bag, before you put it in your suitcase. I’ve seen terrible things.

Have fun, watch out for cops, and send me a postcard!

Lindsay Miller makes the best driving mixes you’ve ever heard.