Celiac Travel: Road Trips, Hotels, and the Parking Lot Moment
About four months into being a celiac, Elaine and I took a six-hour drive down to Los Angeles for a getaway.
What I had not planned for was the moment, somewhere around hour three, when we needed lunch and I looked up at one of those clusters of signs and could not eat anything I could see.
It was the strangest experience. I was sitting in the passenger seat. I was hungry. I was looking at a row of signs that, two months earlier, would have been a perfectly fine list of options. McDonald's. Arby's. Subway. Popeyes. A Wendy's a little further down. A Panera at the next exit. A Dairy Queen across the road.
I sat there and ran the list, and the list went, in my head, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Not probably no. Not risky. Just no. The bun. The bun. The bread. The bun. The bun. The wrap. The cone. I was not at home. I was not at one of the small set of restaurants in San Francisco I had already vetted. I was on an interstate, and the interstate, it turned out, was a place that had been built for a version of me that no longer existed.
Elaine asked what I wanted to do. I remember saying, I don't know. I might just eat the snack bag.
That was the moment when I understood that travel, even small, familiar, in-the-car-for-the-afternoon travel, was now a different category of thing.
The bag, the cooler, the home-base move
Eating on the road is, more than anything else, a planning problem. It is the part of celiac life where the work that used to be invisible — I'll just stop somewhere when I get hungry — has to become visible. You don't get to outsource hunger to whatever exit happens to be coming up. You get to outsource hunger to the planning you did before you turned the key.
That sounds heavier than it is. In practice it is mostly a few small habits.
The first habit is the bag. Every road trip now starts with a bag of snacks I packed at home from things I know are safe. Bars I have already vetted. A ziplock of GF bread. A bag of tortilla chips. A jar of peanut butter that lives in the door pocket. Apples. A few squares of dark chocolate. Dried fruit. A bottle of water. The bag is not a meal. The bag is a hedge. It exists so that the moment I just described, in the parking lot at hour three, becomes a different moment — I'm hungry, I'll eat the bar in the bag and we'll figure out lunch when we get there — instead of a stuck one.
The second habit is the cooler, if the trip is long enough to justify one. A small cooler with ice packs holds a couple of days of breakfast and lunch supplies for someone who is willing to eat simple food. Sliced cheese, carrots, a pack of GF tortillas, leftover chicken from the night before we left. None of it is fancy. All of it lets me skip an unsafe meal.
The third habit is the home-base move. Wherever we are spending the night — a hotel, an Airbnb, a relative's house — I treat that location as a small kitchen, and I bring just enough infrastructure to make breakfast and the occasional lunch out of it. A loaf of GF bread. A jar of peanut butter. A box of GF cereal and a pint of milk for the mini-fridge. A few bananas. If the place has a coffee maker, breakfast is solved before I even leave the room. The hotel breakfast buffet downstairs may or may not be safe — usually not, in any way I trust — and a celiac who shows up to a hotel without a plan for breakfast is a celiac who is going to be hungry at 8 a.m. in a city that doesn't open until 10.
Toaster bags
One piece of equipment turned out to be one of the best small purchases I have ever made. Toaster bags. They are little reusable heat-resistant pouches you slide a piece of bread into before putting it in a toaster. The bag protects the bread from the toaster. The toaster, more importantly, has just been protected from contaminating the bread. You can use any toaster — a hotel toaster, a friend's toaster, the toaster in the Airbnb that's been there since 2014 and has clearly been used to toast a thousand bagels — without any of the cross-contamination worry. The bag is the protocol.
I bring a couple of toaster bags on every trip. Combined with a loaf of GF bread and a small jar of peanut butter, they have made breakfast solvable in places where breakfast would otherwise have been a problem.
These habits aren't free. They cost time, on the front end. They cost trunk space. They cost a little bit of the looseness of road-tripping that you used to take for granted — the we'll just figure it out when we get there energy that is, for non-celiacs, half the fun of a road trip in the first place. I miss that looseness. I am not going to pretend I don't.
But the habits give you back something larger, which is the ability to be on the road at all, without the parking-lot moment becoming the defining feature of the day. A celiac who has packed the bag, brought the cooler, set up the home base, and put a couple of toaster bags in their dopp kit has bought themselves the freedom to focus on the trip instead of on the question of when and where the next safe meal is coming from.
That trade is worth it. Make the trade.
The simplest meal wins on the road
The first thing you learn is that the highway map of America is a wheat map. Most fast food, by volume, is a bun, a wrap, a tortilla, a battered fried something, a piece of bread with stuff between two slices of it, or a noodle. The number of major chains that can put a real, dedicated-fryer, properly-handled gluten-free meal on the table for a celiac is small.
The list of which specific chains work changes every year, so I won't print one here — by the time you read this it would be wrong. But the larger pattern doesn't change: on the road, the safest meal is the simplest one. Grilled meat, plain potato, plain rice, cooked vegetables. A burger ordered without the bun. A chicken Caesar without the croutons and verified for the dressing. A scrambled egg breakfast without the toast. The fancier the menu item, the more places gluten can hide. The simpler the order, the fewer places you have to verify.
I have eaten a lot of grilled chicken on a lot of road trips. I am not bored of it yet.
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