Eating While Travelling

Sometimes travelling, much as I love it, trips me up for eating. I get hungry, I don't plan, I don't scout places, I end up making bad choices. Not just things that are bad for me, but unsatisfying wrong ideas because I just want to settle. In particular, unless I pick up grab-and-go pre-made the day before salads at the airport, it seems it's hard to get good vegetables when travelling. I recently went on a trip to Seattle for a few days, and actually some things worked out well.

The interminably long flight on Alaska Airlines had food for sale, and I went for a hot egg scramble that had vegetables and potatoes and was actually quite good. But I got dehydrated - I didn't bring water and they didn't come around with it often enough, and that kind of put me off.

The big learning for me from this trip is to go ahead and bring along a little bit of chocolate to have in my room for a bed time snack. I am often feeling the need for a sweet snack in the evening. But I have also had aspirations of eating really well on the road, and therefore haven't planned to indulge this craving. I have seen myself get obsessed and go on a bakery hunt or ice cream search through a strange city at night to scratch this itch. This time, instead, I brought along some Dove squares in my suitcase, and it seemed to do the trick. I was able to avert all thoughts of spontaneous indulgence by remembering I had something for later.  This doesn't always work, and I don't always need it to work (life is too short to never change your mind) but this time it was fine.

I had time to scout the Pike's Place market and grab a nice bowl of chowder. The place is both a working farmer's / fisherman's market and a tourist mecca, so in between the fresh and raw ingredients are bakeries and chocolatiers. Nothing that looked out of the ordinary to me (and no special ice cream, which would have probably have pushed me over the edge).  I ended up at a very nice and hugely expensive Thai restaurant for dinner with colleagues, and it was fabulous, but I should have skipped the less than spectacular cocktail. 

I knew I'd be up very early due to jet lag, so I made a plan before bed for a nice breakfast. I found a 24-hour place - not a working person's breakfast cafe, more of an after-hours late night bar - and had a magnificent frittatta with broccoli, cauliflower, and zucchini and cheese. It was too much food, I left a big chunk, but it set me up for the day.  For lunch, I found a place with hawaiian tacos - they made a distinctive slaw with an asian inspired peanut sauce, and I had ginger chicken with it. Fabulous, and just right, plenty more chewy vegetables.

Dinner again with colleagues was at my suggestion, an Italian restaurant near the hotel. I had hoped for the bar and happy hour small plates, but we ended up in the restaurant. So a terrific pasta dish it was, no complaints, and since I felt responsible it was great everyone else was happy as well.

Breakfast at the airport was an issue - if at the mercy of airport food, hard to find a breakfast that is not carb-heavy. But I figured better to eat eggs on a bagel than just a bagel.  And I had plenty of time to buy my own big bottle of water for the return, somewhat quicker (thank you, jet stream!) flight. Again, food for sale - I got a "tapas" box. All shelf-stable food, chips, hummus, olives, dried fruit, almonds. It was adequate given the limitations. It suited me more than the cheese plate, though that also looked good.

So no chance at weight loss on a trip like this, but it was not a disaster food-wise. In fact, it was tasty without being reckless.