At 5:50 on a Friday morning the ice maker in our freezer makes the saddest sound in the world, the sound of a tray that has already been emptied twice. That is how I know the cooler is packed and we're about to leave.
We have taken three trips since March: Wilmington and Kure Beach, two nights at an older motel in Myrtle Beach, and one night camping at Jones Lake State Park in a tent we borrowed from Wes's sister Tonya. On all three, the cooler did more for our budget than anything else I planned.
What goes in
Our cooler is a plain 48-quart one we've had since we rented the single-wide in Pembroke. One lid hinge is cracked and Wes has fixed it twice with a zip tie. It holds two days of food for two people if I'm careful about the order things go in.
- Bottom: a frozen half-gallon jug of water, a block of ice from the freezer (I freeze water in an old ice cream tub), and two frozen bottles of sweet tea.
- Middle: sandwich makings (ham, turkey, sliced cheese), boiled eggs, a container of pimento cheese, and whatever's left of Sunday's chicken.
- Top: fruit, a bag of cut celery and carrots, mustard and mayo packets saved from takeout.
- Outside the cooler, in a grocery bag: bread, peanut butter, crackers, apples, a box of granola bars and paper towels.
Frozen jugs are the trick I'd tell anybody. They keep things cold, they don't slosh water all over the sandwiches, and on day two you've got cold drinking water.
How long the ice lasts in a North Carolina May
On the Myrtle Beach trip in April it was in the high 70s and the cooler sat in the back seat with a beach towel over it. The block and the jugs lasted all of Friday and Saturday and were still mostly solid Sunday morning. We bought one $3 bag of ice Saturday afternoon to top it off.
At Jones Lake it was warmer, about 84 by afternoon, and the cooler sat in the shade of the car with the windows cracked. Everything stayed cold for the one night, but the ice in the corners was melting by noon Saturday. In real summer, with the car sitting in a parking lot in the mid-90s, I'd plan on buying ice every day.
Two rules we learned: open it as little as possible, and decide what you want before you lift the lid. Wes is a lid-lifter. He'll stand there holding it open looking for the pickles like he's reading the paper. We are working on it.
The $46 it saves us
I compared what we spent on food on the Myrtle Beach weekend with what the same weekend would have cost eating every meal out. I didn't guess. I wrote down prices from the places we walked past.
Eating every meal out on a two-night weekend, the way the two of us would actually do it, looks like this: Saturday breakfast at a pancake house, about $26. Saturday and Sunday lunches at a sandwich or burger place, about $30 each. Drinks and snacks bought at gas stations and on the beach, about $16.
That's about $102 before supper. With the cooler, those same meals cost us $40 in groceries from home, plus $3 for ice and about $13 for coffee and one round of ice cream. So $56 instead of $102. That's $46 a weekend, which is more than our gas for that whole trip.
We still eat supper out. I'm not going to drive to the beach and eat a pimento cheese sandwich on the motel bed for supper. A fish shack supper is half the reason we go. The cooler covers the meals we don't care about so we can spend the money on the one we do.
Over a year of one trip a month, $46 a trip is about $550. That's two whole trips. When I told Wes that, he went out to the carport and put a fresh zip tie on the hinge without being asked, which is about as excited as he gets.
One more thing: I write the cooler groceries on the trip envelope like any other expense. It would be easy to pretend food from home is free, but the ham and the cheese came out of our grocery money, and if I don't count it the trip looks cheaper than it was. I'd rather have the real number.
