back from vacation

Vacation was great, but as I said on my biking blog, there's no place like home, and I'm glad to be back. I am happy with my progress as a healthy vegan during my vacation. Two things stand out: 1) I used to live in Texas and New Mexico and Louisiana, places I traveled through on this trip, and I used to love barbeque, fried chicken, mexican food, fried catfish, fried everything. On this trip, I didn't have any desire for it, and just occasionally remembered that, oh, I used to love this stuff. On the few occasions we went to restaurants I just brought my food, which I preferred, and left a nice tip. Sadly, when I looked around the restaurant, half the people were overweight, and the other half were obese. So there does seem to be a consequence of all that "delicious" food. 2) I didn't have the desire to splurge when I got home on unhealthy vegan food (muffins, cookies). I used to want to splurge after spending a few weeks on the road watching everyone else eat unhealthy food. Instead, I wanted the things I wasn't able to eat on the road like steamed kale and smoothies. (see today's food log). pretty funny.

I did have some slip-ups. I started out the trip over-eating. This is partly because of my past association with bringing lots of junk food to snack on on road trips. Also, travel mate still eats junk food on road trips so maybe I was feeling envious. Eventually feeling like crap from over-eating cured me of my sentimental feelings about snacking on road trips. In the old days, I used to eat m&ms and cookies and drink coffee to stay awake. Since we had 2 drivers, I substituted napping for snacking and that worked really well. However I eventually ran out of nuts and seeds due to the overeating at the beginning of the trip. Then I underate as a result. Eventually I scored some raw sunflower seeds and that was better. I definitely need the nuts, but if I eat too much, I definitely feel like crap. I lost weight on the trip and I am already thin and don't think I should lose anymore. I think that's from when I ran out of nuts and seeds. I'm going to write another post about an experiment I'm going to try to keep me from both over-eating and losing weight.

I ate very well. We had an electric cooler, a hotpot, and a campstove. I had planned to bring a folder of recipes for cooking soups while camping and I forgot it. But that actually made it more fun as I got to be more inventive. Here I am cooking something up while camping with a javelina in the background.

I made a few soup recipes which I'll post. Two were done while camping, and two were done in hotels, one in a hotpot, the other on a real stove. I also made a lot of green salads, and lots of bean salads--great for lunch or dinner (I'll post the bean salad). The green salads usually had lettuce, fruit (apples & oranges, sometimes banana), maybe some peas and/or corn, some fresh parsley (happened to buy a bunch), and some salt-free olives, so similar to the big easy salad. Here's one mouth-watering example:

It was easy to get fresh produce since every town has a grocery store. It wasn't organic or as fresh as I'm used to, but it was still pretty good. I went longer than usual without berries because I prefer organic berries to conventional (esp. conventional strawberries which are sprayed with fungicide). But at one point when staying in a hotel with a real fridge, we got frozen berries and had delicious breakfasts made from berries and bananas and sunflower seeds, warmed in the microwave. That was great. We also got frozen peas and corn to put on the salads--that lasts a day or so, and I like them better than canned. But we also had canned peas and corn and they were tasty too. Everything was tasty!

One lesson learned for next time is that I did need more food and I decided next time I will make oatmeal. I'll bring oats and soak them overnight with dried fruit and then it will be a quick and filling meal to heat up for breakfast with some chopped nuts. It's a good high-calorie compact food to travel with.

Another thing that helped us is we found a chain of hotels that we liked and became "members" and you could order rooms that have microwaves and refrigerators. This chain happened to be Holiday Inn Express, but I'm sure you can find many others that have similar amenities. It turns out that the "leisure" rooms have the microwave and refrigerator. I'm going to try to start using this for my business travel too.

One little vegan side-note: We drove through the self-named beef capital of the world, Hereford TX in the panhandle, and saw lots of large feed lots and meat packing companies with their long lines of "meat" outside ready to be "packed". It was depressing. It reminded my of my previous road trip through this region in 1997--that time through Dalhart, TX. Now I wonder if that's what planted the seed that made me turn vegetarian several years later.