Food - at home and on the road

I've finished organising the accommodation for our road trip. We're overnighting in 16 different locations, two nights on a ship, five days in a beautiful bed and breakfast in Tasmania and two nights in another little beauty, a miners cottage, in Ballarat. The rest is an assortment of hotels and motels. We have friends/housesitters moving in the morning we leave and the lady next door will help them with the garden and chickens. I'll give you the details of where we'll be later in the week. This trip is to promote the book and meet people but it's also the retirement trip Hanno and I promised ourselves a few years ago. There is so much to see and enjoy here in this beautiful country of ours. We're both excited about it and meeting up with Tricia who will fly to Tasmania and join us for the trip back.

There's been a flurry of cooking in my kitchen here and while cooking I've been thinking about our food on the road. It will be mainly tea and toast for breakfasts, a trip to the bakery to buy fresh bread for lunch and a hot meal at the end of the day, either at our accommodation or at a local pub. I'll pack an esky for cold drinks, milk, butter, tomatoes, cheese, fruit and cold cuts or chicken. In some ways we'll be a little travelling home on wheels. My main priority is to avoid fast food and sandwich shops and to buy the fresh food we need as we travel along. I want to recycle along the way too, just like we did on our last trip.

Travel has changed so much over the years and even this simple kind of travel, that doesn't involve flights or trains, waiting in queues, questioning at borders, sitting and sleeping onboard with hundred of unknown people, still requires accommodation and topping up on food and drink as we drive along. We do have those two nights onboard a ship but no borders to cross, no passports required, no invasion of privacy. It's a far cry from the days when we would have travelled in a coach pulled by horses with dust, bushrangers and days, instead of hours, between towns. Now we have a comfortable car to travel in, we'll have cold drinks and hot tea with us, we'll have snacks when we want then, music or Radio National, books, phones, iPads and soft pillows. It doesn't seem so simple when you spell it out like that but we'll still have that gentle pleasure of stopping on the side of the road to admire the scenery, wade in a river, slowly walk through a town and talk to the local folk. I wish we could leave now. :- )

And this is what I've been cooking in the past couple of days: plain and walnut pikelets, bread, chicken satay and some sausage and vegetable rolls for Jamie's after school snacks and our lunch. Plain and simple food always satisfies us. I'm running down the chest freezer in these last few weeks before we go away. That gives me a chance to make sure we're not wasting anything that may be lurking in the bottom of the freezer and to defrost and switch off the freezer while we're away.

Now the travel arrangements and itinerary are set, I'll have time to knit and sew some things I want to take away with us. There is so much to look forward to. 

What's happening in your world in the coming weeks?

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