Eating Well on Vacation
I tend to eat very well in general but when I go on vacation I eat especially well. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I eat a lot. It means that I eat very rich foods.
Having always been a huge fan of variety, I’m also a pretty adventurous eater. While at home, my daughter and I have a tradition wherein with each week’s shopping we always buy one new food item that we’ve never tried before. We’ve been doing this since 2010.
People ask me all the time, “Don’t you ever run out of new things to buy?”
The answer is unequivocally NO! In fact, even four years later, we frequently end up getting more than one new thing. It’s truly astonishing just how many things there are in this great big world of ours.
Not everything we try is to our liking. Some things fall into the “no thank you portion” category. That is, we’ll try enough of it to say that we did then leave it at that. This is actually fairly uncommon for us.
We’ve also found a bunch of new favorite things simply by trying so many new things.
My daughter is a strict vegetarian. Although I classify myself as a flexitarian, I tend to eat about 95% vegetarian. It is not my aim to get to 100% (I think a little flexibility is a good thing and I don’t eat vegetarian for moralistic reasons) but I do prefer to stick to a primarily vegetarian diet most of the time.
Even with that limitation, it’s both easy and tasty to eat very well on vacation. In fact it’s while I’m on vacation that I tend to exercise my dietary flexibility most often.
Picnic lunch, made on the spot
Eating well doesn’t have to necessarily be more expensive, more extravagant or even more elaborate. Here is a case in point. This sandwich, with sliced avocado, mackerel and sprouted greens on whole grain bread was part of a picnic lunch that my then- girlfriend and I whipped up on the spot at a rickety old picnic table from ingredients we’d bought at a local market just a half hour earlier.
We sat under the shade of a tree next to a butterfly garden on the grounds of a university in Nova Scotia. The picnic table was so rickety that we had to sit on opposite sides and be careful not to move around too much lest the whole thing collapse beneath us!
We also had fresh fruit, yogurt and drinks. The entire lunch probably didn’t cost $15 for both of us. Parts of the meal were eaten with plastic utensils and using spread out plastic grocery bags as placemats.
One more thing I recommend is to photograph your vacation food before you eat it. People may look at you funny for doing it but you will bring back memories of more than just the places you went and the landmarks you visited. You will bring back the memories of what made that trip special and exciting for you.
(Interested in my travel itinerary for my visit to Nova Scotia? I share the whole thing here.)
