Traveling While Vegan

This is part of my A to Z challenge for April

We recently got back from a trip to Europe. One of the things that I find really stressful about travel is figuring out the food.

Traveling while vegan isn’t actually all that hard. If all else fails, head to any restaurant featuring food from Asia. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, etc – there is so much vegan food to be had. Not for us though. We have to throw an extra level of difficulty onto it. The husband’s food allergies rule out all those cuisines.

My first issue was what to eat on the flights. You can ask for vegan food but it is almost always going to be Indian or have hummus. So I took inspiration from a seatmate the husband had on our last trip back from Europe. She was vegan and had packed a full bag of food for the plane ride.

I had a backpack full of food. I started with bars. I don’t normally eat energy bars but I figured if we were hungry they would do. I had LaraBars because they just have a few ingredients.

Then I had some plain Pringles. Again, not good for us but they come in that hard cylinder so they wouldn’t get crushed while packed. I also had pretzels that I put into ziploc bags and squeezed them between bigger items. I figured if they got crushed they would still taste good.

I had an orange for each of us. I also had made a baked sweet potato that I packaged with black beans and corn for each of us. At the last minute I made a loaf of banana bread to use up some bananas we had and brought that with us.

So what actually happened?

Our flight was around 6 pm. We got to the airport early like you are supposed to but we got through all the security quickly. We killed time by going to a restaurant that had veggie burgers and sweet potato fries.

When we got to the first layover in New Jersey the husband decided to eat again. We went to an Italian place. I got pizza with no cheese on it. (This ended up being a theme on this trip.) It is pretty good – bread, tomato sauce, and lots of veggies. Think of it as bruschetta.

Because of that second meal, we weren’t as hungry as I anticipated on the plane. So what did we eat? The pretzels, some Pringles, the oranges, and most of the banana bread. I had to throw out the potatoes because I was pretty sure I couldn’t bring them into Europe.

We landed in Zurich around lunch time. The husband had a muffin at Starbucks. I ate more banana bread.

I’m going to have other posts about what we ate in Prague and what we ate on our cruise later.

I was more worried about the flight back. It was a daytime flight and we didn’t have a kitchen to prepare any food ahead of time.

I had packed a large package of Golden Oreos in my suitcase. I moved that to the backpack. I still had the bars. We spent a few days before our flight collecting extra cookies and muffins from the breakfast buffet on the cruise. This was not going to be a healthy flight home.

In Frankfurt we hit another Italian place, Lucullus Nero. This one had non-dairy cheese for the pizza! We had big pizzas to fill us up for the trans-Atlantic flight.

We landed in Chicago and had time for a stop at an Italian restaurant. I had a pasta with a basic tomato sauce. By this time we were getting close to 24 hours of travel time. We were too tired to care if we were hungry. Once we got on the last flight home, we were out cold.

We made it home with no allergy issues and not starving. I wish we could have had healthier food on the way back but it worked.