Taking a family road trip and staying on point nutritionally isn’t impossible; it simply takes some planning. The most important element to success is choosing accommodations with a kitchen. From roadwarriortrips.com:

Travelers who create a little semblance of home when they are on the road can better keep off the vacation weight. By preparing your own meals when you can, you can stay fit more easily while you travel. You will want to look out for accommodations that have kitchens so that you can prepare healthier meals.

This post isn’t about keeping weight off; it’s about being sensible.

Tomorrow morning, my young men and I, along with two of their friends, are headed up to the High Sierras to do some snowboarding. Our trip will run from the 24th of December (today for you), through the 1st of January, 2015. That’s eight nights in a town not well known for easily accessible organic fruits and veggies. About a month ago, I identified a condo with a kitchen because I knew I wasn’t going to eat my meals out and at the lodge for the entire trip. When you have limited culinary options in a small town, planning to cook makes a ton of sense. From civileats.com:

Wolfson and Bleich analyzed data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) to find out whether the link between healthier diets and frequency of home cooking can be documented scientifically.

As part of the NHANES data gathered between 2007 and 2010, approximately 9,500 adults 20 and older were asked about their cooking habits. Researchers found that households that reported cooking dinner at home most frequently (6 to 7 times a week) consumed “significantly fewer” calories and ate better than those who relied more heavily on restaurant meals and frozen foods.

In order to not reach for convenience foods on our trip, we will stop at our local grocery store on the way up to Mammoth for healthy foods. Doing so will help us avoid the diminished quality of produce forced by the climate and provide us an opportunity to prepare meals as if we were home. It will take some preparation, of course. We will be buying perishables like eggs, meat and milk. The simple solution, of course, is buying a few cold bags and packing them with ice. For our family, the financial and energetic investment is a no brainer.

Will mobbing through a grocery store with 4 teenagers dying to get to the slopes suck? Sure it will. But I’ll be crushing organic apples all week. Every time I pull one out of my backpack on a lift, I’ll be glad I did.

It’s going to be a white Christmas, guaranteed.

Kap