FOOD EQUIPMENT
Don’t take a big, heavy, elaborate lunch basket. If you want to know what perfect comfort is, get a tin breadbox with a padlock, and let it stay on the floor of the tonneau. In the bottom of it you can keep tins of potted meats, jars of jam, and a box of crackers, some milk chocolate, or if you like better, nuts and raisins. And on top you can put everything you lay your hands on! Books, sweaters, medicine case, and a pack of oiled paper to wrap luncheons in. We had a solidified alcohol lamp, a ten-cent kettle, and thermos bottles, a big thermos food jar, which we filled with ice cream if the day was hot, and one of the bottles with cocoa if it was cool. Coffee (if you put cream in it) has always a corked, musty taste, but cocoa is not affected, neither is soup. Food tastes better if you don’t mix your bottles. Keep the jar for ice cream, if you like ice cream, a bottle for cocoa or soup, and two for ice or hot water. On long runs in the Far West, a canvas water bag is convenient. You can buy one at almost any garage, and it keeps water quite wonderfully fresh and cool.
On top of our permanent supplies we put the daily luncheons we took from the hotels: sandwiches, boiled eggs and fruit and the above-mentioned cocoa or ice cream. Cocoa we bought at the hotels, but our favorite place to buy ice cream was at a soda-water fountain.
The tins in our bread box we hoarded as a miser hoards gold—as a surplus that we might need to keep us alive; and, as is the common end of most misers, when we got to San Francisco and our journey was over, the greater part was still left—to give away.
EXPENSES
The following pages of actual expenses copied out of our diaries may be useful as a table of comparison by which other travelers can form an idea of what their own are likely to be.
For some the trip will cost more, but on the other hand, it can be done for very much less. In every case we had the kind of rooms that are assigned to those who, without questioning the price, asks for “good outside rooms with baths.” Undoubtedly, there were in many cases more expensive ones to be had, but in all cases there were cheaper ones.
Our restaurant bills, however, were comparatively light. We seldom ordered more than three dishes each, and the restaurant charges to people of very substantial appetite, will run more rather than less. On extras, of course, anyone could add or subtract indefinitely, but the details noted may serve as a scale of current charges.
The garage bills speak for themselves. Each man knows how far his own car can go on a gallon, and how often he wants it washed. No one can count his repairs in advance, but our garage bills, however, were certainly very much heavier than average. E. M.’s car is at best an expensive one to run, and on this trip it was at its worst, having been driven without overhauling for two years.