How We Handle Groceries, Laundry, and Everyday Life on the Road

life on the road

May 25

Written By Kelly W

Instead of feeling like a vacation all the time, long-term travel for us is more like layering a vacation mindset over everyday life. There’s still work, responsibilities, errands, and random tasks that pop up. We still have grocery shopping, bills to pay, prescriptions to manage, and afternoons spent sitting in a laundromat instead of hiking a trail.

The beauty is that, on the road, we’re prioritizing adventure, joy, and exploration more than we normally do.

Over time, we’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out how to make the “everyday life” parts feel easier so that more of our energy can go toward the fun parts of extended travel. Here’s how we handle groceries, laundry, and all the little logistics that come with traveling for weeks and months at a time.

This post is part of our “Living on the Road” series. You can read the rest here:

👋 Meet Us: We’re Jonathan and Kelly, and for five years, we lived on the road for weeks and months at a time—working full-time, building routines in new places, and turning everyday life into a series of road trips. We’ve spent our “Travel Seasons” exploring everywhere from the Canadian Rockies and Alaska’s highways to New England in the fall, and along the way, we’ve learned how to make life on the road feel normal, sustainable, and really, really fun.

Groceries

Groceries are usually one of the first things we get when we arrive somewhere new. Sometimes we’ll even stop on the drive between stays if there’s a Walmart or Sam’s Club on the route and we still have enough room in the car. Other times, we’ll unload first and then head straight back out.

If we’re staying somewhere for a few weeks or a month, we want groceries handled quickly because it helps us settle into a place faster. We’re not grocery shopping the same way we would for a normal vacation, where most meals are out and groceries are mostly snacks. At the same time, we’re not grocery shopping exactly the way we do at home either. It’s kind of a hybrid.

We want life to feel easy, flexible, and fun while we’re traveling. We want to try local restaurants and experience a place through food because that’s part of why we travel in the first place. But since we both work full-time on the road, we don’t want to have to figure out breakfast or lunch during the workday.

So at the beginning of a stay, we’re usually trying to figure out two things: Where’s the best place nearby to buy in bulk? Where’s the closest grocery store for restocks?

Walmart, Sam’s Club, Costco… those are usually the first places we look because the first grocery trip is the big one. That’s when we’re trying to get enough breakfast food, lunch food, snacks, drinks, and easy dinners to carry us through as much of the stay as possible.

When it comes to our grocery list, we eat pretty simply on the road.

A lot of PB&Js.
Deli meat sandwiches.
Breakfast bars.
Frozen pizza.
Frozen vegetables.
Pasta.
Rice.
Eggs.
Toast.
Oatmeal.
English muffins with peanut butter.

Things that don’t take long to cook and can shift with us depending on how the week ends up looking. Some nights we plan to eat at home, and then we stay out exploring longer than expected and grab dinner somewhere local. Other nights, we plan to go out, only to realize we’re tired and want frozen pizza and a movie instead. So we buy foods that work either way.

We also intentionally built quieter nights into our Travel Seasons because that’s one of the things that makes long-term travel work for us. Mondays and Wednesdays became our “stay in” nights over time. Those are the nights where we might work later, catch up on life admin, do laundry, watch sports or movies, and rest.

So, groceries have to support those days when we want to stay in. We mostly eat the same foods over and over on the road because once we know something works well, it’s easier to just keep buying it than to rethink groceries every week in a new place.

Laundry

The best-case scenario for laundry is always in-unit laundry. You can just throw in a load whenever you want, exactly like you would at home.

Shared laundry is workable too, but you have to think about it a little more. We’ve stayed at places where multiple cabins shared one laundry room, and each cabin had assigned laundry days and times. If our cabin had Monday evenings, then Monday evenings became laundry night whether we felt like it or not.

Other places have shared laundry where you just sort of have to keep checking whether the machines are open. Hotel laundry is similar. Sometimes you walk in, and the machines are available immediately. Sometimes every machine is full, and you have to come back later.

Laundromats are usually the biggest production, especially if we have to drive there. We’ve used laundromats outside Glacier National Park, in Massachusetts, near Lake Placid, all over the place at this point. The Lake Placid one was actually nice because we could walk there, so we’d just set timers and walk back and forth. Other laundromats we’ve had to drive to, and usually if we’re driving there, we’re staying there. We’ll bring our computers and work while we wait so that we can move laundry between machines quickly and get everything done in the least amount of time possible.

At home, we do laundry separately because it’s easy to just throw in a load whenever it’s convenient. On the road, if we’re already going to a laundromat or using shared laundry anyway, it’s easier to just throw everything together and get it all done at once.

We’re also not separating laundry on the road. Everything goes into the same load. If there’s something delicate, I’ll usually put it into a small laundry bag for extra protection, but generally speaking, we’re not bringing high-maintenance clothing on the road in the first place.

One thing we’ve learned is that laundry on the road actually starts with what you pack. We want clothes that hold up well, pack well, and can be worn a bunch of different ways. Things we can hike in, wear around town, wear to dinner, and wear multiple times without looking worn. Basically, we’re packing versatile and durable items.

Fabric matters a lot, too. We really love merino wool because it’s odor-resistant and can be worn multiple times before it needs to be washed. That makes a huge difference when you’re living out of suitcases for months because it means you can pack less, do laundry less often, and generally make life easier on yourself.

That’s the kind of thing we didn’t really think about before long-term travel. Then suddenly you realize your favorite clothes are the ones that:

dry quickly
don’t wrinkle
don’t hold odor
don’t need special handling
and still look good after being worn repeatedly

We also bring multiple laundry bags with us. A big laundry bag becomes our dirty clothes hamper while we travel. Dirty clothes go directly into it so that when it’s time to do laundry, everything is already gathered together and easy to carry.

Then we’ll bring smaller laundry bags for things we want to protect more in the wash. I’ll usually turn our Unbound Merino tanks inside out and put them into one of the smaller bags. We also always bring our own detergent. I use Molly’s Suds because I have sensitive skin, and bringing it with me is easier than trying to find it somewhere on the road later.

Sometimes success on the road looks like a specific activity… and sometimes the goal of the day is to just do laundry because it sets us up for the next week of adventures.

Everyday Life Admin

Finally, there’s the category we think of as life logistics. These are the things we need to do to keep life moving forward while we’re on the road.

Sending a birthday or anniversary present.
Restocking something because we couldn’t bring it ahead of time.
Picking up a prescription.
Getting a prescription transferred.
Replacing something we forgot.
Whatever random thing comes up that just has to get done.

We try to limit the number of admin to-dos on our plate while traveling by not buying much on the road in general. We usually bring things with us ahead of time or handle them before or after the trip whenever possible.

Those are two of our biggest philosophies about life on the road in general: (1) If we know we’ll use something consistently, we should just bring it. That applies to detergent, toiletries, skincare, medications, makeup… all of it. (2) We treat life on the road as a vacation mindset layered over everyday life.

Because we travel by car and stay in Airbnbs and hotels rather than living in the car itself, we can be more generous with what we pack. At the beginning of a Travel Season, we’ll usually bring enough toiletries and everyday products to get us through most or all of the trip. Things like full-size toothpaste, face wash, face and body lotion, extra toothbrushes, and full-size makeup products.

If it’s something easy to replace at CVS, Walgreens, or Walmart, it’s less important to bring it with us (since these stores are widely available across states). But if it’s from Sephora, an online-only company, or a specialty store, I would rather have it with me in advance than spend part of the trip tracking it down.

Also, while we’re on the road, we want it to feel like we’re on vacation as much as possible. For us, that means making travel, experiencing new things, and having fun the priority. Anything that can happen before or after a Travel Season usually will.

We do this to preserve the feeling of the Travel Season as much as we can. It’s a special season when we prioritize connection, joy, and adventure over productivity, maintenance, and responsibilities. That doesn’t mean we ignore those things, but it does mean we’re intentional about what actually has to happen while we’re traveling and what can be delayed, automated, or done in advance, so our priority on the road is enjoying the area we’re in.

How We Handle Groceries, Laundry, and Everyday Life on the Road

Groceries

Laundry

Everyday Life Admin

Road Life: What We Do the First 24 Hours in a New Place

What Daily Life on the Road Actually Looks Like