# Celiac Travel: Road Trips, Hotels, and the Parking Lot Moment By Gregory Wilson · Excerpt from Chapter 6 of *Celiac vs Me* 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. 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 wrap. The cone. 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. 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. You don't get to outsource hunger to whatever exit happens to be coming up. You get to outsource it to the planning you did before you turned the key. **The first habit is the bag.** Every road trip starts with a bag of safe snacks I packed at home. Bars I've vetted. A ziplock of GF bread. A jar of peanut butter that lives in the door pocket. Apples. The bag is not a meal. The bag is a hedge. It exists so that the moment in the parking lot at hour three becomes *I'm hungry, I'll eat the bar and we'll figure out lunch when we get there* instead of a stuck one. **The second habit is the cooler**, for trips long enough to justify one. Sliced cheese, carrots, GF tortillas, leftover chicken. Lets you skip an unsafe meal. **The third habit is the home-base move.** Wherever we're spending the night, I treat that location as a small kitchen and bring enough infrastructure to make breakfast 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. The hotel breakfast buffet may or may not be safe — usually not — and a celiac without a breakfast plan is a celiac who's going to be hungry at 8 a.m. in a city that doesn't open until 10. ## Toaster bags One of the best small purchases I have made. 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. You can use any toaster — a hotel toaster, a friend's toaster, the toaster in the Airbnb that's been there since 2014 — without cross-contamination worry. The bag is the protocol. These habits aren't free. They cost trunk space and a little of the looseness of road-tripping. But they give you back something larger: the freedom to focus on the trip instead of on when the next safe meal is coming. That trade is worth it. ## The simplest meal wins The highway map of America is a wheat map. Most fast food is a bun, a wrap, a tortilla, or a battered fried something. The number of major chains that can put a properly-handled gluten-free meal on the table is small, and the specific list shifts every year. 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. 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. --- This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Celiac vs Me. The full chapter also covers airport food (the strategy: assume nothing — eat before you leave, bring a bag through security, treat the airport hotel room as another home base), and the second half of celiac travel: the trip somewhere far. How I almost canceled an eastern Mediterranean cruise booked before the diagnosis, the work it took to keep it (restaurant cards in Turkish, Greek, and Arabic; vetted-restaurant lists per port; a Facebook group per country), and the rule the trip taught me — preparation buys back possibility. - [Paperback](https://a.co/d/0ci9KEzr) - [Kindle Edition](https://a.co/d/0dqv86CH) ## Related chapters - [The Day You Get the Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/the-diagnosis/) - [The First Weeks of Celiac Life: Rebuilding Your Kitchen](https://celiacvsme.com/the-first-weeks/) - [Telling People About Your Celiac Diagnosis](https://celiacvsme.com/telling-people/) - [Reading Gluten-Free Labels: Certifications, Ingredients, and Hidden Gluten](https://celiacvsme.com/the-aisles/) - [Eating Out with Celiac: Trust Signals, Dignity Signals, and the Bridgeport Ribeye](https://celiacvsme.com/the-table/) - [The Holiday Calendar with Celiac: Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and the People Who Love You](https://celiacvsme.com/the-calendar/) - [The Body Underneath: Bloodwork, Healing, and the Real Goal](https://celiacvsme.com/the-body-underneath/)