Save money! Practical tips to help your food budget stretch further on family road trips
Tracy Morris shares how to holiday without spending a fortune on feeding your family.
When travelling as a family keeping costs down is a key factor for most of us.
Whether you are on a short mini break or a longer holiday, here’s a few helpful tips that adventure Mum, Tracy Morris from The Blonde Nomads has found over her years while travelling on the road.
How to get the most out of your holiday food budget
Meal plan – When you know what’s for dinner each night it’s a lot easier to keep costs down and stop those impulse buys when shopping. You can also plan to bulk buy items like meat, where you can stretch it over a few dinners.
We also find that by having a meal plan, we are not scratching our heads come 5pm after a big day, wondering what’s for dinner.
TOP TIP: Make sure you read the ‘Use by’ date on food packaging when shopping (especially in smaller towns) and select the items with a longer shelf life so nothing will be wasted or go bad.
Tracy Morris says having a food plan and buying in bulk is key for sticking to a food buget.
Cook extra, plan for leftovers – We like to cook a little extra for dinner so there are leftovers for lunch the next day, whether that’s a few cold sausages to have on a sandwich or yummy pasta bake – this takes us to our next tip…
Pack a lunch, avoid fast food – When road tripping it can be very tempting to grab some drive through food on-the-go. Not to mention that fast food not being the healthiest can be quite costly when you add it up, especially when feeding a large family.
We like to make sure we have something planned for lunch in our car fridge. Dinner leftovers in our Thermos® FUNtainer® Food Jars are a favourite as they keep our food fresh and hot from up to 5 hours and cool for up to 7 hours.
If food stores are running low a simple tuna wrap is super easy to make on the go. For breakfast on a travel day, we often make some Bircher muesli the night before.
Be creative – When the fridge is running low, we try to use up all the bits ’n bobs to ensure there is no waste. We call this a ‘fun lunch’ or a ‘fun dinner’, with lots of different ‘picky’ items on our plates, think a boiled egg, some avocado, a cracker or two, a slice of cheese, whatever needs to be used up. Just make it colourful and fun! The kids just love it.
Tracy Norris is currently road-tripping around NSW with her husband, Rob and their two kids, Marli and Ziggy.
Happy snacks – As any parent would know, travel comes with an element of waiting or sitting still and with this always comes the ‘I’m hungry’ cry from the kids. We like to be prepared with a few healthy ‘time wasting’ snacks on hand.
These include things like trail mix, popcorn, dry cereal and fruit. Items that take longer for tiny fingers to pick up or peel like mandarins, bananas or even a boiled egg (which we let the kids peel themselves). These are all low cost items that travel well.
We always have plenty of water on hand too, as we hate purchasing bottled water which is usually overpriced and in single use plastic bottles. We use Thermos® Vacuum Insulated Water Bottles, as they keep the water cool from up to 14 hours and travel so well.
Catch and cook – Travelling is an awesome way to explore and teach the kids new things. One element that we are passionate about is knowing where our food comes from so there’s no better (and cheaper) way than to catch it ourselves.
You know the saying, ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime’, well that certainly rings true in our family with the kids often out-fishing us and putting food on the table.
It’s always a good idea to have a back-up plan for dinner in case the fish are not biting.
Use up all leftovers to ensure there is no food waste.
A few other quick travel tips include…
Make stops fun – Instead of stopping at a rest stop on the side of the road, a quick search on Google when you arrive into a new town for a ‘play park near me’ will make the travel day a bit more fun and have everyone burning off some of that energy.
Car friendly activities – We like to keep our mini blondies engaged on long trips. A quick trip to a discount store for a new activity is always a winner, think; magic ink pens, sticker books and colouring in. We also have a few car games we like to play and are just getting into podcasts and audiobooks.
Plant the seed – When travelling as a family we always like to get kids involved as much as possible. We let them have a say in our activities and often give them a map or brochure of where we’ll be heading. This gets them excited for the trip and sets their expectations of what our day/week will look like.
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