Packing Food for Family Vacation

When we travel, we love exploring new restaurants! For us, eating out is part of the vacation experience. However, we typically also pack a variety of snacks and meal options to take with us. Packing food for family vacation makes certain meal times easier for us – and it also saves us lots of money.

Oftentimes, purchasing snacks on the go or groceries in tourist areas can get expensive. So we usually try to plan ahead a bit, and we’re always glad when we have.

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For trips that include air travel, we are usually forced to do things a little bit differently, but for weekend trips to the mountains or week-long vacations to the beach, these ideas have worked well for us for many years now.

Snack Bags for the Kids

When it’s time to hit the road, I usually hand each of my kids a gallon-size snack bag. Their bag is labeled with their name and includes snacks for them to enjoy as we travel.

SHOP STAINLESS STEEL WATER BOTTLES FOR TRAVEL

No passing things out in the car…no purchasing snacks at gas stations – they have what they need, and they’re all set for the drive!

A Variety of Snacks on the Kitchen Table

Our bags typically include the following kinds of snacks:

protein bars
popcorn or pretzels
Chex Mix
S’mores in a Bag
crackers
dried fruit
nut bars
granola
applesauce
Joyride candy

Any trash, wrappers, etc. go back in the disposable bag which keeps things a bit more tidy in the minivan.

Another great thing about this idea!

Note: You know your child best – and if their age/stage pairs well with a plastic bag. 😉

Now on to the meal options for when you arrive to your vacation destination.

Simple Meal Ideas

Years ago, I snapped these photos of some simple meal options we were packing for a beach vacation. At the time, we were traveling with our then-infant and toddler.

For this particular trip, I was planning to make:

pancakes – a mixture that only required water
veggies and bread to serve with some chicken I had prepped and tossed in the cooler
everything we needed to make easy at-home pizzas
ingredients for tacos (The ground beef we needed was in our cooler.)
supplies for spaghetti (The ground beef for this was also in the cooler.)

If you’re planning to travel with meat in your cooler, you can prepare and freeze it ahead of time. Or you can travel with it frozen and then cook when you arrive to your location.

If I’m going to travel with these kinds of things, I prefer to have them cooked ahead of time, but if I feel rushed while packing for a trip, I will wait until that mealtime and prepare there – but I usually regret this! ha!

Over the years, our family has grown – and I’ve become more ingredient-conscious. While our choices may not always be perfect, you will notice a bit of a difference in these more recent photos taken before leaving for a trip.

simple pancake and muffin mixes
lots of Mexican food
a couple of pasta options
desserts – I ran out of time to make these ahead of time, but now that my kids are older, sometimes they enjoy doing the baking there!

In the Cooler:

I’ve mentioned that we sometimes travel with a cooler.

We may have meat (like mentioned above, but also lunch meat), milk, eggs, butter, cheese, etc. in a cooler, but sometimes we do wait until we arrive to our destination and either do a quick grocery order or use our Walmart app and schedule grocery delivery to where we’re staying.

Waiting until we arrive to our destination seems to be the best option for obtaining fresh fruit and salad ingredients for the week – these things can be tricky to transport in a cooler.

Honestly, we also like to pick up some ice cream as well.