Picnic from the grocery store.
Grocery shopping while traveling is a super fun hobby of mine. My husband might have groaned a few times when I said we needed to go to the store. It was just so fascinating to see what the store had to offer that was different from home!
Admittedly, it took us much longer to shop, even when it was just the two of us, but I can’t help it that I love grocery stores, can I?
We shopped at a variety of stores in the UK, finding ALDI to be the best for price, places like Asda or Tesco the best for selection. I think we saw the inside of almost every chain in the UK; we even had lunch at Costco once.
At the grocery stores in France, we regularly stocked up on apples, clementines, melba toasts, crackers, cookies, and water bottles, grabbing baguette and croissant from the boulangerie. These, along with fresh cheese, meat, and yogurt — when we had access to a fridge to freeze water bottles for ice packs — served as great snacks and easy breakfasts and lunches. It was near impossible to find ice in France, but I did use some cheap frozen vegetables to pinch hit for coolant.
In Great Britain, it was much easier to find bagged ice at the store; the folks at Premier Inn were always very gracious in giving us free ice in the evening, so it was easier to keep a cooler filled with the basics. We kept to pretty much a similar grocery list, swapping digestives for the melba toast and throwing in more crisps than crackers for a snack. Our picnics were always very tasty.
We’ve done the same in Hawaii and in Japan, assembling snack foods and other cold items like cheese, crackers, fruit, yogurt, and lunch meat for grocery store picnics. Ekiben are special boxed meals prepared for train travel in Japan. They are quite beautiful!
