Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com.

That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Today I'm going to fire up your creative juices so that you can fire up your taste buds cheaply while you're on the road. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua and I am your host. This week we've had some pretty deep and heavy philosophical discussions. I wanted to switch it up right now and talk to you a little bit about how to save money while cooking on the road. I'm going to give you some very, very, very practical tips.

I enjoy traveling. Sometimes I enjoy traveling more than others. There are times in which travel is a real joy and there are times in which travel is a lot of work. But I think most of us are going to engage in some kind of travel and that travel may be for fun and for pleasure because we're really into it.

That travel may be because it simply is something that we should do and need to do to help our business, our career to expand. I make a recommendation to you that you plan to go to, say, about four seminars per year, one per quarter, seminars that are in your industry or the conventions that are appropriate to your work.

Well, if you're going to do that, there's an expense associated with that and that expense can be very significant. It wouldn't be unusual for somebody who wants to attend a convention or a workshop or a class or a seminar that will help further their career. It wouldn't be unusual for that to cost a thousand bucks just for a two or three-day seminar.

Maybe it's a couple hundred dollars for your ticket, a few hundred dollars for your flight, a couple hundred dollars for your hotels, and a couple hundred dollars for your food. That's really significant. And if you start doing that regularly, two, three, four times per year, that could add up to multiple thousands of dollars.

And the same thing would apply if you're just traveling for fun. You want to go on a trip with your family, with your wife, with your husband, with your children. That can very quickly add up to significant amounts of money. And I want to give you some ideas to help you defray those costs because there is a certain amount of travel that I think is really important and valuable for you to do.

And if you're going to go to a seminar, there's a big difference in your travel plans. If you're going to go to a workshop or a convention that's helpful to you in your career, there's a big difference in how you can approach that. So I've talked at other times about how you can minimize your costs.

I talked about the idea of, for example, staying in your car. I've done that many times at conventions and workshops. I sleep in my minivan, put a nice mattress in there. That saves me hundreds of dollars on hotel bills. You might be adventurous enough to do that. Or maybe you have a small RV or you stay with a friend or you just get a good hotel deal.

You can figure out ways to minimize those costs. You can always cut your costs of entrance to the seminar if you are a speaker. That's one of the most valuable benefits of speaking in public. I frequently, routinely speak at seminars. And my major, I don't necessarily always get a fee, but sometimes I'll do it just for entrance into the seminar.

And that saves me a few hundred bucks. It's great. It works out fine. I don't mind giving a 30-minute talk or a 60-minute talk or participating in a breakout session or sitting on a panel if that'll save me a few hundred bucks. I'm happy to do that. And then especially if it's something that's in my industry where my opinion and advice is going to be useful, then that's the right context for it.

And then the expenses of getting places, sometimes that's more straightforward. I think most of us do our best with shopping airplane tickets or driving there if you need to. But one of the things I haven't talked a lot about is food. And food can be a significant expense. It can especially be a significant expense if it's not just you as an individual.

As an individual, especially if you're an adult individual, there are lots of things that you can do to save on your food. I frequently will engage in some simple strategies when traveling such as eating less frequently. I'll often only eat a couple of meals a day. Generally, we don't really need three meals a day, especially if we're not doing heavy manual labor.

So a couple of meals per day will get you through. I'll frequently try to eat a breakfast at a place that serves a very large breakfast, maybe a buffet, and I'll intentionally overeat at breakfast time, so knowing that I'm not going to eat again until the evening time. As an individual, it's relatively easy for you to just take some basic snack foods, whether you travel with a bag of nuts when you are getting on the airplane so you don't have to buy airplane food, or if you make your own trail mix, or those types of tricks.

Those are simple kind of entry-level stuff that you should be doing, and that's relatively simple to do as an individual. And frankly, as an individual, money is just—sorry, food is often not that big of an expense. In just about any city in the world, any American city, you could eat on $10 to $15 a day as an individual if you're willing to be flexible.

Maybe that means a few dollars to pick up a breakfast sandwich somewhere. Maybe it means a few dollars for an inexpensive fast food hamburger or a couple of tacos from a taco truck. And then maybe you allow yourself one full restaurant meal. You can go into just about any city in the world in most normal environments, and you can find a mid-to-low-tier mass-market restaurant where you can purchase a hamburger and fries for $8 to $10.

So you bring in a tip on top of that, drink water, and you can do it on $15 a day. $20 a day, very without a problem. If you're just going for a three-day convention, if you set yourself a food budget of $15 or $20 a day over three days, that's really not that disruptive to a budget.

It's not, in the grand scheme of things, that big a deal. But all of that changes if you're not only one person or not only two people. And this is something that those of you who are single or who are simply married and operating as a couple, you may not appreciate this the way that those of us who have children do.

People talk a lot about the expenses that children bring into your life. That's fine. I think it's fine to look at those things. I think many of those estimates that we read from time to time, "Children will cost you $150,000 to raise," are stupid. They're dramatically overinflated. Children will cost you as much money as you have or as little money as you have, and you're the one who decides how much they cost you.

So I like to discard many of those things because the cost of children is generally not a multiplied cost. For example, it doesn't cost you if you have – let's say that you're married, you have a wife and you have two children. It doesn't cost you four times as much to have a house that can accommodate a family of four than it does for you to have a house that can accommodate a family-size unit of one.

It doesn't cost you four times as much to do that. It doesn't cost you four times as much to drive around in a vehicle that can accommodate your family of six than it does for you to drive around in a vehicle that can accommodate your family of one or two.

It just simply doesn't. Children don't cost – there's not a straight additional cost for each and every one of them in most categories. But there are a few categories in which children absolutely will multiply on a one-to-one ratio your expenses. And one of those categories is food, especially when it comes to food of eating out.

Now there is an increased cost of food when you are buying groceries. However, that increased cost is not just times four. But there is an increased cost. But when you are going out to a restaurant, if you're going out with your family of four, especially if they are not children who are going to pick at a few bites and be done or to order off a kid's menu, there is a 4x cost for a family size of four that's different than one.

Everything multiplies. Now everything doesn't multiply when you're doing groceries because you can purchase a larger quantity for just a little bit more money. There is a bigger quantity with the quantity of food. But frankly, the quantity of food, at least basic ingredients, for much of the food that most of us eat is really not that big a deal.

There's a cost of heating up the food, cooking the food, the utensils, but those things aren't times four. But in a restaurant, they are. If you've got three teenagers in your household, you know that it costs you five times as much to go out to dinner with your three teenagers as it does to go out to dinner by yourself.

Because the teenagers just aren't happy, like my children still is, picking off of my plate. That's not going to work with your teenager. Your teenager would prefer to have their own glass of strawberry pink lemonade, not to have a few sips from yours. And so it costs you five times as much.

That can be a real problem when it comes to traveling. Now of course most of us with children learn new skills, and I'm in the process of learning those new skills to deal with it. You'll frequently find that families will approach things differently. And it's by necessity. If you're going to take a trip, whether that's your annual pilgrimage upstate to visit your family for Christmas, or if you're going to go on your weekend at the local resort or go down to Disney or wherever, you've got to learn new strategies to deal with it.

And since the money is not infinite, many of those strategies involve saving money. So I want to give you some specific tips and tactics here. And I think these are really valuable because if you'll implement these, and if I can get your creative juices firing where you can start to plan ahead, if you'll implement some of these things, then they'll be helpful for you and will probably free you up to be able to get more value even out of your trip.

I, like you, really enjoy the gastronomic experience of travel. It's super fun. That's part of visiting a place. Engaging with local cuisine, whether it's a down home Louisiana jambalaya or whether it's fried crickets, all of these are part of the fun of traveling. I love to get up early and go and sit by the fireplace and have a tremendous meal on a beautiful snowy day or to go to some great place that you've always wanted to go to.

I think of many experiences that I've been fortunate to have. I remember I went to, in the James Bond movie, Casino Royale, which was one of the really popular James Bond movies a decade ago, where they were just changing the whole series over. The main hotel from that is actually a hotel called the Grand Hotel Poop in Karlovy Vary, Czech Republic, and poop is spelled P-U-P-P.

The Grand Hotel, I think that's how you pronounce it, poop, Grand Hotel Poop, maybe pop, let's go with that. Grand Hotel Pop in Karlovy Vary, which is a little resort town in the Czech Republic that is famed for its, what is it, the spring water, the tonic, I forget what it is, but basically the water is supposed to have these tonifying effects.

So it's this famous resort town where people would come from all over Europe to go there and it's a beautiful hotel. I was in the Czech Republic and of course we went and had a great big breakfast there and just to enjoy the whole experience of being in this magnificent, beautiful hotel that was used as the backdrop for the Casino Royale, the James Bond.

I was single at the time. It was easy to do as a single man, but you know what? Even with my children, I still would want to do that. I still would want to enjoy those gastronomic experiences, but for me to enjoy those peak experiences, I'm going to need to minimize in some other areas.

I don't want to just go to Ruby Tuesdays and eat out and have a breakfast at Cracker Barrel every single morning, which with a family of five, it'll cost you $70 and then go and have some mediocre, normal food experience at some mid-tier mass market restaurant. I want to enjoy the richest experience that I can.

I want to go to the steakhouse on the 51st floor. I want to go to the Korean barbecue place that is just world renowned. I want to go and eat the xuelongbao, the Shanghai dumplings from the world famous restaurant, which in my opinion is one of the best places for you to go if you're traveling and if you have the chance to go to a city where there's a restaurant called Din Tai Fung.

They're in Hong Kong. There are a couple of locations in Hong Kong. I think there's one in Shanghai and Singapore. They've expanded around the world. There may be one in Tokyo. We're in a place where you can get xuelongbao. It's the name of the specific kind of pork dumpling.

It's a dim sum type of dumpling, but it's very intensive. Sorry, one of my favorite foods in the world. It's called xuelongbao, X-I-A-O-L-O-N-G-B-A-O, or you can just call it Shanghai dumplings. But it's this just delicious pork mixture that gets wrapped up inside of a wrapper and it gets cooked in a steamer basket.

It just has this ... I don't even know how to describe it. It's amazing. So I want to take my whole family out and I want to go to Din Tai Fung and I want to spend ... It's not even that expensive there. I want to spend the money to have those peak experiences.

I don't want to waste my money on mediocre food just to get the budget through. I want to enjoy that aspect of it. But in order for you to do that, you're going to have to cut back because most of us, you can't ... It's too expensive to do that all the time.

And so the best way for you to cut back is to figure out some ways for you to cook some of your basic food for yourselves on the road. But this is going to require some planning. Now I want to ... There is a measure of simplicity to this that you don't really need anything more than me just to say, "Figure out how to eat cheap on the road by having your own food with you." You can take a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter, a jar of jelly with you and you can eat peanut butter and jelly three times a day and you can survive.

And frankly, it's not that bad. But it does get really boring. And in terms of the richness of travel, there's a big difference for you and there's a big difference for your children of how good it feels to have a long day traveling, maybe a long day out sightseeing or a long day on the road, to come into your hotel room and to sit down and eat a cold peanut butter or a room temperature peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

That's very different than if you can come into your hotel room and sit down for a nice, fresh, hot meal, maybe some hot rice, a fresh pork roast, something like that. There's a big difference to those things. And it's not that hard to cook on the road, but you got to have a little bit of gear.

So that's enough preamble to ... Let's get into some of the ideas. Here's some things that I want you to think about. Number one, are you traveling in the car or are you traveling on an airplane? There's a big difference, of course, between these two in terms of the amount of gear that you can have and what you can bring with you.

Don't think just because you're in an airplane you can't take things with you. You can. No matter whether you're flying from New York City to Paris, you can still take food with you, food and cooking utensils. You may have to take a much more basic kit. You may have to really streamline, simplify, lighten and minimize what you're doing.

But you can still take things with you in an airplane. It is, of course, easier to take things with you in a car. And many of the times with families, you'll wind up traveling in a car more. One of the other areas where kids are absolutely five times as expensive is when it comes time to buying airplane tickets.

Pretty easy for ... I live in Florida. There are cheap tickets all the time up to the Northeast. Pretty easy for me as a single man or my wife and I to pretty much grab a ticket up to the Northeast any time. That's cheap. When you multiply that times five, all of a sudden you need a really good ticket deal in order for that to be the best move.

And it becomes a lot cheaper and easier just to maybe just get in the car. I had a day on the road and you can get somewhere. So that's why families will tend to use more car travel. The great thing about car travel is it does give you the ability to carry more stuff with you generally.

But don't think that it's just one or the other. If you are traveling on an airplane, you're flying somewhere, staying at a resort, staying at a hotel, renting a cabin, getting an Airbnb, or you're renting a car there, still seriously consider and add to your packing list some cooking gear that you may or may not need.

Many times a family will choose to rent a place that has equipment such as renting a house or a cabin or an Airbnb facility where they're going to give more equipment. One of the benefits is that you can cook for yourself more easily than if you're in the best Western.

But even if you're in the best Western, I want to give you some ideas. If you're flying on an airplane, don't be scared to take an extra bag or pack an extra bag. And there is this place, I think this is the place where checking bags is really great.

Everyone has a different philosophy on checked baggage. I know people who refuse to carry on baggage and I always admire how light and free they are when you see someone walking on an airplane and they got nothing more than a book under their arm. I've always operated under the assumption that there are two kinds of baggage, carry on and lost.

And so I've always carried on and I've always tried to have the smallest bag possible because that makes you much more mobile. But that has to change. That changes when it's just me versus when it's me and multiple other people that I'm responsible for. In order for me to handle things and be adequately prepared, there comes a place to check the bags.

And I'm not scared to check a bag full of cooking gear if that's what it comes to. The two basic things you need to plan for is how to keep your food and how to cook your food. Now there are many options and you can choose something that is as simple or as gourmet as will be appropriate for you and your family.

There are plenty of ways that you can eat without any need to keep food fresh. You can eat peanut butter and jelly. And yeah, they say refrigerate after opening with a jar of jelly, but you can keep a jar of jelly unrefrigerated for a week and it's not going to have a bit of a problem.

So you could just take your peanut butter and jelly and there's no need to refrigerate it. You can take a bag of almonds and soak them a little bit to soften them up and you don't need to put yourself in a situation where you don't need refrigeration. You can get vegetables and they can go many days without refrigeration and be perfectly fine.

So you don't always have to keep your food. The big thing where you usually will wind up keeping your food is if you're getting into something that involves meat. Meat is basically really the only guaranteed thing that you're going to need to keep it cool or eat it. But even meat, there are other options that you could do.

So here's some ways that if you are, for example, traveling on an airplane and you don't have the room to bring a separate cooler with you, then don't forget about the fact that you can always use canned meats or bottled meats. You can also use dehydrated meats. And canned meats, bottled meats, dehydrated meats, all of these types of ways will allow you to have meat on the road without the need to engage with refrigeration.

This could also just be the time to go ahead and embrace your vegetarian side. I've been learning how to do more vegetarian cooking, pulled back a lot on the amount of meat that we've been eating, and it's a skill set. But the great thing about vegetarian food is that much of it can be stored and kept for a very long period of time without refrigeration.

Meat is where you really get into it, where you need that refrigeration. If you're actually going to cook something, then I think your best bet, if you want meat, is probably to learn more about some of the dehydrated meat options. There are canned meat options as well. But generally, you're going to need to look a little bit and practice a little bit to find it.

Canned tuna is, of course, crazy easy to find, and canned chicken, of course, is relatively easy to find. You can actually can lots more kinds of meat, but there's not a huge commercial market for it. If you wanted to have bacon, you can buy canned bacon. And you can buy many more kinds of canned meats.

They're just not as prevalent as things like tuna and chicken are. But look into that market and see what your options are. You can also find some kinds of meats that are, say, packed in a foil pouch or a plastic pouch and by virtue of their method of preparation don't require refrigeration.

Obvious thing would be jerky or things like smoked salmon. There are various options, things that are smoked and dehydrated that will provide options for you. One of my goals is to eat more and to learn how to cook with more dehydrated foods and freeze-dried foods. There have been major breakthroughs in the last decade with the technologies of freeze-drying and dehydration, where at this point today you can purchase from many manufacturers dehydrated meats and freeze-dried meats and everything else as well that are really good and seem to have really good results.

So don't be scared. Even if you don't have refrigeration, don't be scared to look around and learn a little bit. Many things that we think need to be refrigerated don't. Eggs, you can keep eggs for, well, if they're fresh eggs, you can keep them for many weeks without refrigeration.

The sailors all have learned how to, if you're going out on a sailboat, you're provisioning a sailboat, you can take eggs with you on the sailboat. The key, if you're going to keep eggs without refrigeration, is a fewfold. Number one, they need to be relatively fresh and the mass market eggs that many times that we buy from the supermarket are already a few weeks old.

So if you are going to be traveling without refrigeration and you want to have fresh eggs with you, then your best bet is to get the freshest eggs as possible so that you can keep them, that they'll be good for a longer period. Incidentally, a little trick for you, using fresh eggs for hard-boiled eggs is where you wind up in a disaster.

So I don't know if you've ever been in this situation. If you find yourself hard-boiling eggs and the eggshell won't separate from the actual flesh of the egg, it's probably because the egg was very fresh. The best types of eggs to hard-boil are eggs that are old, that have been out for a few weeks and have had some age to them.

I don't know why. I've never researched the actual molecular science of what's going on, but it's one of the reasons why you know that your eggs that you buy standard are a few weeks old, because they hard-boil really well generally when you get them from the grocery store. But if you're going to be keeping eggs for a long time, one of the things that the sailors teach is you want to, from time to time, rotate your eggs.

So you flip them upside down and you keep moving them upside down. They used to do things, I think they call it Isinglass, where they would go and create a brine, basically, that you would put the eggs down under for extra long storage. And then if you're doing things like that, say keeping eggs without refrigeration, then you want to add another step to your cooking process, where instead of breaking all of your eggs into a single bowl all together, you never know if you might run into a rotten egg.

And so crack your eggs one at a time into a separate bowl. So that way, if you do have an egg that's rotten, your nose will tell you, your eyes will tell you. God gave you a good eyes, a good nose, and a good sense of discernment about food.

You know when the food's bad because it's disgusting. So you'll know if you crack the egg if it's rotten, and that's the one that you throw away. You don't eat that. Just trust your eyes. So many people are so squeamish and throw food away because it's reached its expiration date or throw food away because it's been in the fridge for three days, and this is absurd.

It's a waste. Your eyes work well, your nose works well, and that's about all you need to figure out if you should eat something or not. Follow your gut. So there are ways. You can keep many foods without refrigeration. It's just for a shortened lifespan. Now if you do have refrigeration, probably your best, easiest move is to just have a cooler.

Coolers are easy to get. They're cheap to get. You can get the cheap ones, and they're relatively easy to service. You can buy a bag of ice at any gas station nearby. If you're staying in a hotel room, just about every hotel is going to have an ice machine, and so your most sensible option is to carry a cooler with you, use the ice machine in the hotel, and to just keep your cooler fresh.

Now a couple thoughts on coolers. There has been tremendous breakthrough in cooler technology over the last few years with the development of roto-molded coolers and what they call it, roto-injection. I think there's two technologies, something like that, but basically the Yeti style of cooler. The first big brand to break into the market in a big way was the Yeti cooler, and there have been a bunch of other ones now that are available as well.

You can buy high-end ones. You can go down to your local Walmart, and Walmart now sells roto-molded coolers under the Ozark Trail brand. You could buy an Ozark Trail brand of these coolers at your local Walmart. They have a superior technology where instead of being the old-style technology of plastic with a foam core, which would give you a few days of coverage, the roto-molded coolers have a superior technology where they're insulated much better.

Of course, if you're a DIYer, you can always enhance that insulation yourself. Wrap a blanket around that cooler, make sure it's always in the shade, maybe adhere on some insulation to the outside if you need to do that, but you can do that with a cooler and you can keep yourself going.

In a hotel room, there's no reason not to have a cooler. Grab a luggage cart to get it in and out of the hotel room. You got fresh ice every day. Bathtub you can pour the water into. It'll work really well and it'll expand your options to give you options on some of the things that you wouldn't otherwise have the chance to use.

You have to ask the question of do you have electricity or not. In a moment, we'll talk about cooking, but there are many times when you need to make sure that you plan ahead of whether you're going to have electricity available. If you don't have electricity available to you at all, ice is, of course, a little bit harder to generate.

If you're out in the woods and you're not going to have access to a refrigerator or a freezer, then one of the technologies that you could consider doing is consider, if you have a car, consider getting one of these small countertop ice makers and ice machines. The great thing about a small countertop ice maker is that it's very efficient from an electricity perspective and it's very, very fast.

The reason it's efficient is because the way that they create ice is they put the water directly in contact with, basically they have little metal fingers inside that have a coolant going through them, and they put the water directly in contact with that. That's a very, very efficient way of making ice.

Many of these countertop ice makers, if you get one and you turn it on, you can go from water to a half a dozen to a dozen cubes of ice in six to 10 minutes. Very quickly, with a small machine, you can create a significant amount of ice. That means that if you're in the backcountry and you need ice to keep your cooler cold, one of the things that you should consider is grab an inverter to hook up to your battery, to use the battery in your car, and then use that, plug in your countertop ice maker, use some of the water that you brought with you, and have that create some ice for you, and then dump that ice into your cooler to keep your food cold.

That would be a good way, if you didn't have electricity available, figure out a way to use your battery or your car or a small generator to run one of those countertop ice makers to keep your cooler. Of course, if you have the money or have the gear, you can purchase an electrical cooler or refrigerator or freezer.

There's been some great breakthroughs in these in the past years as well. You can purchase fairly inexpensively a cooler that will run on 12-volt electricity for your vehicle. It's not a true refrigerator, it's not a true freezer, but it's a cooler. That can help too. They sell it in truck stops and you can find them easily if you go and look online.

Or you can plug into a cigarette lighter socket on your car, and that's the technology that you use for keeping your drinks cool in your truck while you're driving down the road. There are also 12-volt coolers that are well-liked in the traveling and overlanding marketplace now, which are very, very efficient.

They are legitimate refrigerators and they're legitimate freezers. You can keep your ice cream cold, you can keep your beer cold, you can keep your ice rock hard, you can keep your meat cold. They really, really work well. They're so efficient that you can actually practically use them with a normal vehicle, a normal 12-volt battery system.

You don't have to have some triple battery backup system. They're very, very good and they're very efficient now. They're also very, very expensive, anywhere from $600 to $1,000 and up. So this is serious. You would have to really be sure that you were going to get benefit from them by owning them for a long time if you were to pursue that path of option.

So that's some ideas on keeping your food cool, on cooking without cooled foods. You can do it in any circumstance. If you're traveling to the hinter boonies in Africa, then go ahead and just toss in some – all you need to do is toss in some freeze-dried meals, maybe some backpackers, mountain house type of things that are ready in a foil pack and grab yourself one of these little folding stoves that you can fold up into a little flat sheet of metal about the size of your palm.

And when you get to the hinter boonies in Africa, grab some twigs off the ground, stick that in there, borrow a pot from somebody, heat up some water and pour it into your mountain house. You can eat well in that context. If you're just loading up your family in the minivan and going to stop at the Best Western tonight or the cheap hotel on the road while you're on your way to grandma's house, you can eat well.

So let me go on to cooking and give you some ideas on cooking. There are about a bazillion options that you have. Again though, you want to think through whether you have electricity or you don't. Let's start with electricity though because that's the situation that most of us are going to be in.

I'm primarily thinking about you actually being in a hotel room on the road. Now first, if you don't have any gear, you could actually figure out how to do some stuff even with what's standard equipment in a hotel room. This is in a way harder than it was before but you could figure out how to do some stuff.

You could use the iron. I've seen people do this where they'll take the iron and they'll use the iron as a hot pad or a hot plate of sorts. Turn the iron on high. You better have some aluminum foil but if you put a little bit of sheet of aluminum foil down on top of a high iron and crack an egg on that, you can fry up an egg on top of your iron.

You can just toss a piece of bread on that iron and you can toast a piece of bread directly on the iron. I've seen people take aluminum foil, wrap up a couple pieces of bacon and cook it with the iron on some aluminum foil on top of the ironing board.

So you can do that. You can use the iron and in a pinch, that may be what you're doing. I think that's more of a gimmick than anything else. I'm not going to cook for my family of five with an iron, at least not effectively and not in anything except an emergency.

But it's kind of a cool gimmick and it might be fun for you to do sometime to fry up an egg and a piece of toast on your iron. Another actually more practically useful one would be the coffee maker. This is harder to find than it used to be.

In years past, it was relatively easy to find a full-size coffee maker with a carafe in a hotel room. And that's a very useful tool because a coffee maker will easily heat water. Once you have hot water, you can use that for oatmeal. You can add instant oatmeal and whip up a pot of oatmeal in your coffee maker pot.

You can use hot water for cooking some eggs. You're not going to be able to hard boil them because it doesn't ever actually boil. But you can drop some eggs into the pot, put some hot water in there, let them sit for 10 minutes or so and you're going to have some nice soft or medium boiled eggs.

That's perfectly reasonable. So the coffee maker can be used to do all kinds of things. Mostly, at least in the hotels that I've stayed in in the last few years though, those old style of carafe coffee makers have given way to an individual cup style of coffee maker. And frequently, the coffee service comes with a small pouch of coffee grounds, an individual serving size cup and that's about it.

Lot harder to do something with that. I've never tried it. Maybe you could still soft boil an egg, one egg in each cup, but it's just not quite the same ease of use. But don't be scared to use what is actually in there because I think there are options that you could pursue.

Now I think it's more practical for you to bring some gear with you. And you can go from very simple to very complex. This would depend on, in my opinion, how much you were traveling for, how long you were traveling for and what you actually needed. There's no reason if you're just going to make one or two meals at a quick stopover in a hotel on your way somewhere, on your way to grandma's house and way back, keep it simple.

But if you're going to be living in a hotel for two weeks, take some gear with you so you can have some variety. Your children are going to want some variety and so take some gear with you. Now the first place I start when it comes to gear is to serve up power.

And I think it's very valuable for you to consider just taking a power, a spare extension cord and a power strip with you. Frequently, what I have found is that the way that I want to set up my stuff, if I'm going to be in a hotel room for a little bit, doesn't necessarily align with the way that the original person said that they wanted to set up my stuff.

If you're staying in a business class hotel, it's relatively easy. They have the lamp that's the hotel style lamp with the power outlet right in it, right on top of the desk. That's a good place for you to plug in your cell phone charger, your laptop charger, etc. That's fine.

But if you're staying at the cheapo place with the cigarette burns on the, what's the thing called that goes over the bed? The comforter or whatever that thing is called. You know, where the cigarette burns there and you don't want to walk around with your feet off, with your shoes off because you're worried about the creepy crawlies in the carpet.

When you're staying in one of those places, usually they're not set up quite so nicely. And so I always like to travel with a small extension cord and I will also set up multiple power strips. And so when I go to a hotel room, one of the things that I've found very convenient to do is when I first get there, just I plug in my extension cord.

Usually the outlet is hidden behind the bed or something and I set up my central station. Extension cord goes right where I want it. I plug in all the travel with a four gang USB strip so I can charge multiple things when I'm charging camera batteries, cell phone batteries, various gear, plug in the laptop charger, whatever gear that I'm traveling with.

And it takes about 45 seconds to set up a station that makes the whole experience much more pleasurable. Instead of having to reach over behind the TV or reach over behind the refrigerator to plug in this dinky little three foot Apple power cord that they gave you and you got your ear down while you're trying to make your calls.

A lot easier just to go ahead up and set up a station. If you're planning on cooking, then remember to take a power cord. In that case, I wouldn't take one of the small gauge ones that I carry for just simple electrical stuff. If you're going to be plugging in a hot plate or a rice cooker or a hot pot, then I would take one that's a full gauge.

I take one with a strip. So that way if you're in a place where the power outlets aren't set up right, you can still cook in a place where you have a flat surface. Safety is going to be really important. And if you don't think ahead and carry with you a power cord and maybe a power strip if necessary, then you might wind up cooking in a wrong place where it could be safe.

And if you've got children, you don't want to run the risk of having a hot plate or a hot electric frying pan or something like that. And it's in a place where the children could reach it or it could be danger. So be very, very careful with that. Also consider carrying a small table with you.

You can purchase small, lightweight, plastic collapsible tables, which would be very convenient in many hotel rooms. Again, depending on the class of hotel, frequently if you're in a business class hotel, you're going to be staying in a place that has a nice desk. Frequently there'll be a nice table, a nice place for you to put your suitcase.

If you're staying in a cheaper hotel or maybe a hotel in a different country with a different standard, then there may not be quite so much of a place for you to work or for where you – for you to be. And so consider carrying with you a small collapsible table that you can set up and that you can use.

That'll make a big difference in your experience. In terms of gear, there are various options. But I think essentially you want to just talk about ways of heating things up. And you basically have either the need to heat water, which you can do a lot with, or you can do – or you basically have the idea of heating up the food directly.

So these can be mixed and matched depending on what your approach is. As with anything, you can have as many gadgets as you want or as few. You could, for example, carry with you a single hot plate, an electric hot plate, an electric burner that just simply plugs into the wall.

It gives you a single burner and you could do everything on that single burner, whether that's through – with a small frying pan or a small pot that you just simply use. You can use that to heat water. You can use that to cook food in. You could do everything with a small individual hot plate.

I think that's a really intelligent place to start if you have electricity. And you can buy those very inexpensively. I've not shopped much for them, but I've seen 10 bucks. You could buy a super cheap one at your local Walmart. So if you find yourself in a bind, maybe trot down to Walmart, pick up a $10 hot plate and pick up a cheap little pot to cook in or a little skillet to use.

That can be effective. If you don't have electricity, the non-electric version of that is just to carry with you a small single burner butane stove. A small single burner butane stove is so handy. It works phenomenally. You can get great cooking results. If you look in a nicer hotel that sets up in the morning, Omelette Station, you'll usually either see that they're cooking on a single electric hot plate.

Sometimes that'll be an induction with induction technology or sometimes it'll be just an electric hot plate. But very frequently, I see them set up their omelette, the cooks set up an omelette station with a single burner butane stove. They work really well. You can get world-class results from a single burner butane stove.

And yet the whole thing packs down into something the size of a large square book. I have one that I use that has its plastic case. It's maybe, what, 12, 14, maybe 14, 16 inches by 14, 16 inches and about three or four inches thick. That's very, very simple.

I toss it in a bag. And frequently, I use that for something like I toss that in the bag and put in a small French press. And so if I'm on the road and I want to have a cup of coffee, then I can make my own coffee. Now, that's not necessary.

It's relatively easy to find a fairly inexpensive cup of coffee on the road. But sometimes it's nice to do. I've done that where I go ahead and I'm going to pull up at a rest stop, especially if I was staying in the car, stay at the rest stop, get out.

I just set up my little butane stove right on the picnic table, put my pot of water on, heat my pot of water, pour it in the French press, and you've got a cup of coffee there. Don't forget, by the way, if you're traveling, don't forget about the value of instant coffee.

Instant coffee is there's some really phenomenal instant coffees now that are really good and very, very convenient. That's a time-honored tradition that works really well. So get yourself a little single burner butane stove. You'll need to carry with you a couple extra butane canisters. That won't work if you're flying.

You have to check into that, but it'll work fine if you're in the car. So a hot plate, I think, is a really good place to start. A second tool that I think is really worth your considering would be a, I'll call it a hot pot, but basically an electric water heating pot.

Again, these range from the cheap and simple to the very complex. You probably have one of these already in your house. Just grab that one off the counter. But an electric kettle or electric hot water heater where you just push a button and it raises the water temperature to a boil for you is so useful.

You can use that to create all those things, to create hot water for you, which as we talked about you can use for soft-boiling eggs. You can use for adding that to cooked spaghetti and you can use that for heating up, you know, making oatmeal or making a pot of ramen noodles, whatever you want to have.

That hot water heater will just be great and simple. It's very, very safe. It's effective and it works well. If you put together a hot plate with a skillet and a hot pot electric water kettle, electric kettle, that gives you a really powerful way to do those two things together.

That's really, really good. And I think those should be considerations. You can cook directly in a hot pot. Think carefully before you do that with your $90 one that gives you your 170-degree tea water, your 185-degree for black tea water, your 212-degree boiling water. I wouldn't feel all that good about dumping pasta sauce into one of those.

But you could do it with a cheap one and if that's what you've got to cook in or to cook your oatmeal directly in, then go for it. I think you can clean those things out perfectly fine. The next tool that I think deserves a really valid consideration would be a crock pot.

Now there are two approaches that you could take here and with here we'll move into the more fancier gadgets. But an old crock pot is easy to find. And if I were traveling across, let's say I were traveling with my family across the country, I wouldn't hesitate to travel there and swing by just about any thrift store and pick up some cheap old crock pot for $8 or $10.

A crock pot gives you the ability to have just really useful, delicious meals that can be done for you without you sitting there intending it. It's entirely safe for you to set up a crock pot in your hotel room. Let's say that you're at a convention or a conference.

In the morning you go ahead and just like you do at home with your crock pot, you go ahead and if you had some meat, go ahead and brown your meat in your skillet, put it in the bottom of the crock pot. Or even if you didn't have any meat, you put your potatoes in, you cut that up and even if you couldn't brown the meat, you just toss it in there, put in a chicken, hit start, go off to your conference all day and when you come back that night, you're ready to go with your crock potted meal.

Pair that up with a rice cooker that you can come home, you can set all the ingredients and if your rice cooker is fancy enough to have a timer, you could set that so that's done for you. And you can come home to a delicious, savory, satisfying, comforting, warm meal that you can all enjoy in the hotel room or somewhere nearby and that gives you the option of having it ready to go.

Crock pots are wonderful and I think that they deserve your consideration. Heavy, heavy and bulky, so won't work very well to fly with it but if you've got a space in the car, consider putting in your crock pot. The modern take and change on the crock pot is of course the world famous instant pot.

The instant pot technology is basically a pressure cooker, an electric pressure cooker which has taken over, it's very, very popular and it's very, very popular among many travelers. Many RVers for example who face this challenge of how do I cook in a small space while I'm traveling around love their instant pots.

And the instant pot has the benefit of having multiple functions. They say it can be a rice cooker, you can brown your meat, saute your vegetables, all in the same thing and then turn it into a crock pot. So the instant pot advertises itself as having these multiple benefits that you can do it all in one pot.

We recently got an instant pot during one of the Amazon sales. We finally went ahead and tried one and got one. I haven't learned how to cook with it yet. My wife has done it a few times and it's on my list to learn more of the instant pot recipes.

There's a huge enthusiast, there are a lot of enthusiasts around the instant pot brand and around that approach. People who work to use the instant pot to make all of their meals or to make some of their meals, I just simply am a neophyte when it comes to actually using it.

I need to learn some new approaches before I can competently discuss how to actually use it. But those resources are out there. Just start looking and you'll find people who will want to teach you how to use an instant pot. One trick that I don't currently have but I intend to get is something called a thermal cooker.

And the thermal cooker is a very old technology. And basically the idea is how can you cook something without using a lot of fuel? Well the cooking process involves two things. It involves heat and it involves time. And for just about anything that you cook, there is a certain temperature that you need the food to reach for a certain amount of time and that'll vary with everything that you're doing.

But you're manipulating these two variables, what temperature for how long. And so you can cook something at a very high temperature for a short period of time or you can cook it at a lower temperature for a longer period of time. And so there have been many times in the past where people have learned how to cook using this lower temperature but long duration cooking methodology.

You could cook a pig in the ground in a pit at the beach. Many many tropical cultures have developed this technique where you dig a big giant hole in the beach. You start a big old fire. You fill that fire with as many rocks as you can find and you get those rocks as hot as you possibly can.

You take your big giant hole that you dug in the sand. You line it with leaves like banana leaves or whatever you've got but big fat leaves. Banana leaves work great. And then you dump your pig in there and you dump your rocks in there on the outside of it and you dump your pig and your rocks in there, wrap it all up with leaves and then pour dirt over the top, make a big giant mound and go fishing all day.

You do that first thing in the morning. You come back at night. You dig the top off the pit and your pig should be cooked. And it's that you've taken the heat source, the heat sink, the thermal mass which is the rocks and you've put them in a hole to help with insulation and then because it's been left for so long, it can cook over time.

The old-fashioned version of this for individuals who aren't going to dig a hole in the beach and cook a pig in it is something called the hay box where you could take and let's say you're going to make something in a pot. You take your pot on the stove, you put it on the stove, you heat the pot of soup up or whatever it is that you're cooking, the stew.

You heat it up until it's boiling and then you turn the heat off and you put that pot into a bunch of towels and then you put it into a big box and oftentimes they would use a box with hay and basically an insulated box. And you put it in that insulated box and you cover it up and you leave it alone for a long period of time.

There's enough contained thermal energy in the pot of soup that as long as it's well insulated and it doesn't cool quickly, it can sufficiently cook the contents of the soup. That saves you the benefit of having to constantly keep that pot going by adding constant amounts of food. Now you can rig this up yourself.

Some people will do this in a cooler. You can accomplish a similar effect. I frequently, when taking food to somebody's house, I'll frequently get it nice and hot then you take it off the stove, wrap it up in towels or a blanket and then put it into a cooler and you can transport the food and it's very, very stable.

It'll keep it hot, it'll keep it fresh and it won't overcook it because you're not adding more heat. And as long as you haven't overcooked it to begin with, generally it's a very safe way of keeping your food hot just like the caterers do when they're serving food. But there's also a, they've developed commercial products that are related to this called thermal cookers and I've never owned one but I intend to buy one.

And basically a thermal cooker is a very well insulated crock pot that doesn't have a heat source and usually there are a couple different ways that they approach them but it's basically a very well insulated pot. And where these are really valuable would be in a place where you have to be very conscious of your fuel.

So in the sailing community, many people in the sailing community like a thermal cooker because if you're going to cook something you can just use a little bit of your gas to heat it up and then you put it in the thermal cooker and it'll cook all day. The big benefit that I see with a thermal cooker is to have the benefit of being able to carry it with you without needing electricity.

Now if you've got an inverter in your car, you may be able to plug your crock pot in and crock pot your food while you're driving down the road. That's fine and that's good. It's hard to get an inverter in the car because you can't draw enough wattage out of the cigarette lighter.

So you need a big inverter. Those need to be plugged into an actual battery. So unless you have a second battery or you can figure out a way to rig that up, that's a little hard to do. But if you can carry a thermal cooker with you, you can just fill that thing up with food and in the morning you can get it nice and hot and then you wrap it up and it'll sit there and it'll cook all day while you're driving down the road.

And you can do this with all kinds of food. You can do this with fresh food. You can do this with freeze-dried food. But you can set things up so that it'll work really well for you while you're traveling and while you are going down the road. There are people that I found, especially from the prepper community.

What is her name? The best one I know is her name is Chef Tess Bakeress. Her website is cheftessbakeress.blogspot.com. Chef Tess Bakeress.blogspot.com. She has a whole cookbook. She has a bunch of them, but she has a cool cookbook that's focused on how to cook what she calls her meals in a jar.

And it's a really wonderful technology. What she does is she creates these meals that are all with freeze-dried food. And so you have, again, I alluded earlier to the value of the freeze-dried food and dehydrated food. But you can basically have really good quality vegetables. You can have good quality even eggs, dairy, butter, meats.

And you can put all these things together and make your normal recipes. And so what she does is prepares them, put them dry into a canning jar, and you prepare a meal in a jar that has everything together. And then you can just get some hot water. You add some hot water.

You toss it in your thermal cooker. And when you get where you're going, you're ready to go with a pan of lasagna or a Louisiana chicken gumbo. And everything's ready to go, a fresh spaghetti and sauce that's all done. And it was all, none of it required refrigeration. There was no urgency to use it.

So if you decide that you're going to go out to eat tonight, you didn't waste your food. It's easy to make while you're traveling and relatively inexpensive. The freeze-dried food, of course, would cost you a little bit more than fresh ingredients, but you make it up in convenience, storability, the lack of spoilage and waste, et cetera.

And so I think that's really worth looking into. So I'm excited about in the future getting a thermal cooker. So when I can actually have a need for it, then I'll get it. But I think that's a really wonderful technology. And so let me just explain one practical way of approaching this that would be very, very normal I think for a lot of us in terms of actual usage.

Let's say that you're going to take your family and you're going to go on a week-long family vacation. So you think things through and you make a breakfast menu. Breakfast is simple. And one day you want to have some cereal. Your family enjoys eating cereal. I like to buy a bag of granola.

Costco has a good bag of granola. It's all wrapped up. Of course, it's granola. It's easy to carry with you. So what I do is what I've done is grab a bag of granola that is a hearty and granola still has sugar, but it's less sugar than Froot Loops or that type of thing.

So you get a bag of granola and then get some dried milk. And the dried milk, people used to complain about dried milk. I know that used to be kind of the classic tightwad way to drink milk. But dried milk, you can get some really good dried milk. I found some locally at a food supply store.

And I always try to keep it on hand because we don't drink a lot of cow's milk. We don't drink cow's milk in our family really. We use it for baking. And the problem that – the fight that my wife and I have, she doesn't drink milk at all.

I enjoy it. I don't drink it, but I'll have it on things like cereal or something on occasion or if I'm having a brownie. But I can't stand to buy small quantities of things because I can't stand to pay the higher unit price. I don't want to buy a half gallon of milk.

When we first met, she would buy her milk by the pint and I used to make fun of her. I was like, "Who buys milk by the pint?" She's like, "Well, I only needed a cup for a recipe." I'm like, "Still, you're buying a pint of milk. It doesn't make sense to me.

I'd buy a gallon." The problem is that we don't need a gallon. So then if it starts to go bad, then I start drinking milk or using it more unnecessarily. And so what I've mostly settled on is we'll get milk occasionally, especially if I know I'm going to be doing a lot of cooking or cooking things that are going to use milk.

But I like to buy dried milk and then the dried milk can easily make up a quart jar of it. And for the best taste, you make up a quart jar of it, you put it in the fridge overnight, that lets the flavors really meld together and there's nothing objectionable about it.

And so you can get yourself some dried milk. There's nothing to store. When you get to the hotel room at night in preparation for breakfast tomorrow, if you have a refrigerator in the hotel room or if you have a cooler, then go ahead and get a quart jar, measure in your dried milk.

It's with the stuff that I get. It's a one and a third cups of powder and then you add water to that, shake it up and then put it in the cooler. It's easy, refresh your cooler. So fill it up with ice so it'll get it nice and cold and let that sit overnight.

Then the next morning when you wake up, you'll be ready to go with fresh cold milk, a quart of it, which is probably just enough to go on everybody's breakfast cereal. Now you can have a bowl of granola with some milk for breakfast. Or if you don't care to use the dried milk, then get yourself some UHT ultra pasteurized shelf stable milk.

Parmalat is the brand that we usually see here in the United States. Throughout the world it goes under various brand names. But get some of that. It comes in a Tetra Pak size that doesn't need any refrigeration. Same deal, go ahead and chill it down on ice or toss it in the refrigerator in the hotel room and it'll be cool in the morning.

For the first night, bring some bananas. Those work really well. You've got granola, you've got bananas. That'll set you up for an inexpensive breakfast that is easy, has minimal preparation. Of course your first day, maybe you go ahead and make something from home and you just bring some pre-made sandwiches with you for that first lunch and then something for the dinner.

Let's say that you go ahead and you have a little bit of time on another day and you're going to cook, then here's how you can integrate some of these things together. You have a hot pot and a hot plate and a thermal cooker. So you use your hot pot to go ahead and boil up some eggs inside the pot and then you use the water from that to go on some oatmeal.

So you can have a nice hot breakfast. And meanwhile on your hot plate, your electric burner, go ahead and put the thermal cooker pot there and you can work on browning your meat and then adding in some other ingredients. Maybe you're making a chili or maybe you're making a stew.

Maybe you're adding some potatoes, whatever you're doing. Go ahead and add those things in and bring that up to a boil. So you can simultaneously cook a hot breakfast and go ahead and bring your evening meal and get that ready to go while you're preparing it there in the hotel room.

Maybe you've got the kids making sandwiches for lunch as well while you're cooking up breakfast and dinner. Well you serve the hot breakfast, take your pot, get it up nice and hot, put it in the thermal cooker, close that up, clean up your stuff, pack it away. You have your hot breakfast there in the hotel room.

You've got your sandwiches ready for lunch and then all day while you are touring the theme park or touring the national park or going to the zoo or you're out on the boat fishing all day your food is cooking there and it's ready to go so whenever you get to the end of the day and you're ready to eat it you've got a nice hot meal.

And obviously you can diversify your actual experience a little bit and who wants to sit around in a hotel room all the time and eat food on the floor? You go to a local park, you've got your thermal cooker with you, set it up for a picnic and you can have a picnic with hot and delicious food in your local park and enjoy the beauty of where you are.

So if you're going to plan these things out for your whole trip then you just think through the different options. In the beginning of the trip perhaps you are preparing your meat. You're going to eat meat so you freeze your meat, put it in a nice Ziploc bag or maybe vacuum seal the bag, freeze your meat, put it in the bottom of the cooler and you have meat for the first couple of days and your recipes for lunch and dinner revolve around that meat, that fresh meat.

Then after that you go to your plan is your dinner plans go to a vegetarian option, a quinoa or rice, a vegetable or something that's just a vegetarian, dried beans, lentils, that kind of thing that's easy to store, doesn't require any refrigeration and that'll be the foundation of your meals towards the end of the week, the spaghetti and the sauce that's canned that kind of thing.

So you can plan to have your cooled things up front and your non-cooled things towards the end of the trip or maybe that's where you start to bring out your freeze-dried recipes and you've prepared your freeze-dried meal in a jar. For your breakfast and lunch options you plan out fresh fruit towards the beginning.

You bring some bananas, you bring some fresh apples, those things for snacks but then go ahead and bring some cans of fruit to get you to through the middle towards the end of your trip or you do the same thing with vegetables. You have your fresh vegetables in the beginning and you bring some cans of vegetables to get you through towards the middle and the end of the trip.

The point of all of this is to say that a couple little things with you, a few little pieces of gear will dramatically open up your options and expand the things that are available to you. It can result in you being able to do things you otherwise wouldn't be able to afford.

You don't have a thousand dollars to go to that super important conference where all of your people in your business are engaging but you can get there with, but you do have $200 to buy the entrance fee and $150 for the hotel fee. Well, with these ideas that I'm telling you about, you can get there and you can afford to eat while you're there.

Or if you're traveling with your family, these ideas give you the ability to eat cheap food when there's nothing that would be a real gastronomic or cultural experience available and then when you get to where you want those peak experiences or those really fine dining or, it doesn't have to be fine dining, but just the rich cultural experience, then you have the option to have the money still to be able to afford those solutions.

I think I'm going to quit with just a couple more things. I had more on my list but I don't want to belabor this subject much more. Couple of very quick options, especially if you are going to be traveling internationally. Here I'm thinking of you're vagabonding around the world by yourself type of thing.

This is a little bit harder to do on the scale that you need for a family. But if you're vagabonding around the world by yourself, then here are a couple of things for you to consider. Number one, they sell an immersion heater that you can pick up. These are much more popular in other places around the world than the US.

But in the US you can find them at least online. I've never really seen them in stores, although I've never really looked. But you can get an immersion heater. And essentially what an immersion heater is, it's an electric coil that is connected to a wire and it can be very, very small.

There's nothing, it would basically be, they can be from the size of perhaps a small pill bottle, a little bit longer, to perhaps the size of something like an electric hair straightener or curling iron, that type of thing. And you can get them from anywhere from tiny, they'll just go into a cup, like a mug, to something that'll go into a pot.

Or you can get large ones that'll heat up a five-gallon bucket of water or even a bathtub full of water. It just depends on what you need. People use these in home brewing. They use them in many contexts. But if I were backpacking around the world on a budget, I would want to make sure that I had some way of heating up some water for myself.

And frequently, if you're staying in a hostel, you can have access to the kitchen. But sometimes you don't have a kitchen and you just have a shared room in a hostel, you're out of money. Having a small immersion heater would be really, really important and really valuable. Gives you the ability to cook up a hot pot of rice 'cause you can heat up water.

Gives you the ability to make some noodles, that type of thing, where you can have some hot food that's inexpensive. You can boil vegetables, you can do those things, and it'll get you there. You can do it in a makeshift container. Maybe you are traveling with a stainless steel water bottle and that's what you go ahead and use.

So you use your stainless steel water bottle with your little immersion heater down in it and use that to heat it up and cook some rice for yourself or to cook some vegetables or some oatmeal so that you can enjoy a nice hot meal. That changes your attitude. When you're traveling on a budget, you're vagabonding, you're in some random hostel sharing the room with three other people, stretching out your $15 a day budget.

It's nice to have that and that's worth considering. If you're traveling in the United States in a car, the space is not such a big value. I'd rather just have a hot pot. But if you're getting in a backpack and traveling the world, then that would be worth doing.

If you don't have access to a hotel room, maybe you're camping or you're in a more remote or rural place, electricity is not a certain. By the way, that technology, it's one of the things that they use in prison. When the guys in prison want to heat up their food hotter, in prison commissaries, prisoners in the United States are able to buy ways of heating up, be able to buy pots, electric hot water kettles, but they have a lower boiling temperature.

They don't actually boil the water. They're regulated and governed to not boil the water, lest that boiling water become a weapon for somebody who wants to commit violence against another person. And so what they do is they have to figure out a way to do it themselves. And so the solution is to make your own DIY immersion heater.

They call it a stinger. And so what you do is you take a cable, you strip an electrical plug, which has a plug in one end. You strip the wires, you cut the cable off and you strip the wires off the other half and they take fingernail files and break them in half so you have nice metal contacts and connect them up, wire them up, solder them up so you have the ability to solder, but connect it up to make an electrical contact.

And then you plug it in, you throw the ends in a cup and that creates basically an immersion heater, but the jail style, the jury rig jail style to heat up your pot of water. And you can boil the water right fresh and use that boiling water for the recipes that you want to actually have.

So that's that immersion heater. If you don't have it, you can rig it up for yourself. Back to traveling in a remote area. If you're traveling in a remote area, you're traveling on the cheap, take a serious look at some of the mini stove options. Of course, if you're backpacking, you can get the fancy ones that come with gas.

A little hard to get on an airplane with a propane or a butane bottle. Of course, those are super convenient. They work fast and there are a bunch of them that are even self-contained ones. Some of them have the built-in jet boil system where it's built in with the water and the gas system all built in.

But if I were traveling in a remote area, I would carry with me I think something like a small stove and there are a couple of versions of these. There are just very, very simple stoves that you can find. Firebox is one brand, but there are others that basically provide the same functionality as that you could rig up for yourself, a little campfire with something over it, but it's held in the context of a stove.

That's good. There are also some with a rocket stove technology, which are very, very efficient. You can get these tiny little rocket stoves that fold down into their own little cook set, own little pot, and they come in one tiny little thing. You can set up a rocket stove, which you can feed with basically any burnable organic matter, so some twigs or some scraps of wood or some cow chips, whatever you can find that you can feed this rocket stove with, and you can use that to give you your cooking ability.

So study what the backpackers do, study what they use, and then consider integrating that with yourself. The benefit of going that way is you don't have to carry fuel with you. You don't have to buy things like charcoal. You can figure out some branches or some twigs or some just random detritus that you find to heat your water and/or cook on, and they're very effective.

Carry with yourself a small little backpacker pan, and you have the ability now to cook a legitimately delicious meal while you are traveling. So with that, I think I am going to quit for the day on this topic. Hopefully that you enjoyed it. I hope that you found it to be practical.

I'm trying to be very practical here, and I hope that I've opened your eyes to some things that you can do to lower your costs. I'm no expert in all these things, but these are real life new things that I'm facing. I don't have a long history of cooking on the road like this.

Generally, it was just me. If you're a single person, it's relatively inexpensive of just traveling every now and then to just buy your own food. But there are times where I've eaten fast food multiple times in a day, two, three times a day. You can feel sick at the end of it.

And if you're really hardcore and you're really serious about your frugality, these types of things could be really, really useful for you. I know a guy who, he lived on the road. He was constantly traveling, and his employer would give him a per diem allowance. But some of these types of things, you're traveling with a simple pot, a simple pan, and being able to cook in a hotel room gives him and would give him the ability to save an extra $40 a day by not using his full per diem at restaurants.

Hotel restaurants are expensive, and they got you tight because if you don't have a car, you don't want to go out. Sometimes you can't find better deals. So I hope that they will find these things are practical. But I don't like the idea of limiting the things that you want to do just because it's expensive.

I don't like to go on a trip, family vacation, or go travel, or go to a conference. I don't like the idea of limiting it just because it's more expensive. Figure out a way to make it cheaper. And here's the thing. We have become, in our modern world, we have become so soft with the stuff that we're willing to do.

We've become so flabby and lazy. And this is all an artificial construct. My dad, my grandparents grew up in, my grandmother was from California, grew up in Los Angeles, California girl through and through. And my dad grew up on a ranch in Colorado. But they would travel back and forth from Colorado to California sometimes for annual vacation or things like that.

And when they were doing that, they didn't have a hotel, they stopped at, they didn't have the money. They didn't do all these fancy things. What they would do is they would just pull over to the side of the road and one or two would sleep in the car.

My grandmother, I think, would sleep in the backseat of the car. And my grandfather and my dad and his brother would go and lay out a blanket, lay out a bedroll on the side of the road. And this is the days of kind of what you think about when you think about Route 66.

There's no interstate system. There's just a normal two-lane road or a four-lane road. You just pull off the road, roll out your bedroll on the side of the road and go to sleep. No tent, no fancy mattress. You just roll it out and go to sleep. And that's the way that that was normal.

That was not weird. That was relatively normal. That was the way that a family would travel in those days. Now today, I would feel a little bit like I was committing like spousal abuse if I told my wife, "Hey, you go sleep in the car and we're just going to park here on the side of the road." I'm not – obviously, that's not abuse.

But like I would feel that way because our whole society has changed. But that's a construct. That's a social construct, a social idea. And you can change that. You could do that today. You can carry a tent with you. You can find – don't do it on the interstate but you could pull off on some road and walk across the ditch and roll out your sleeping bag and your bivy sack underneath the tree.

You could do it. I've traveled in some places and some places when I've been out – we were preaching in Asia one time. And when you're traveling, there's people coming in from all kinds of churches in the local area, coming into the – to nearby. Nobody has money for a hotel room.

Nobody has money for those things. And so you just lie down on the floor. And sometimes there's a bed, sometimes there's not. Sometimes there's a foam mat or a bamboo mat, sometimes there's not. You just lie down and sleep. Now, my bottom gets a little bit sore for a while because I'm out of shape with that kind of approach.

But you do it for a while and you start to recognize, you know what, we can still be resilient. So don't let the cost of traveling keep you from traveling if you want to do that. Don't let the cost of restaurant food keep you from showing your children what the Grand Canyon looks like.

Load them up in the car, cook on the road, do it cheap, but take them to the Grand Canyon. That's it. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources. Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. S-U-I-T-E-H-O-P dot com. It's more than just a ticket.