road trip comforts

When we take the car on a trip, we travel in comfort. We take a cooler. It used to be the case that very few hotels had fridges, and with a cooler, you can have your Cheerios for breakfast in your room, if you want....

Nowadays it seems that all hotels have fridges (ours on this trip even had a freezer), but we still bring the cooler, as it stands ready, packed with plastic dishes, plastic eating utensils, napkins, salt/pepper/sugar, snap clothespins and twisties, a hot pot for boiling water, and a couple of glass cups (I don't like to drink hot liquids out of styrofoam cups).

We throw in some fresh tea bags, and we're ready to go.

One last thing in our cooler is a plastic vase. On this trip, when we were gassing up the car, I saw a branch lying on the pavement at the gas station. It looks much better here, don't you think?





















One of the nice things about hotels is trying stuff without buying it. Our bathroom in the Comfort Inn in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, had a curved bar to hold up the shower curtain. It bowed out, away from the tub. The effect of this was to add many cubic feet of space to the shower, without losing an inch of floor space. I think this is a brilliant idea! The shower felt very spacious, despite the nararow width of the tub....