Allergy Free Business Trips

So last week I didn't blog because I was out of town at a conference for most of the time, and the other part of the week I was scrambling to do the things I would normally do if I had the whole week in the office. The conference was fun, but I got to thinking about the effort I was putting into making sure I was eating and exercising while on my trip.

For example, my meals were paid for, but I can't just eat out at every restaurant that's conveniently located near my hotel. So my first thought when I heard I'd be traveling by car was "Yes! I can take an ice chest!" You might, as a passerby, think me and my husband odd looking as we strolled through the elegant Hyatt Regency Hotel in Dallas with an ice chest, but frankly I could care less. In fact, I'm sure that the vallet parking dudes (yes, we had to vallet park in order to not get charged $10 each time I left the hotel and came back) gave us a few interesting looks. That wonderfully large, blue ice chest made it possible for me to purchase and store milk free, dairy free, apple free, and banana free foods in our hotel room. Not only was it convenient so that I didn't have to leave the hotel very often to go out to eat, but it also added some variety to my diet (i.e. so I wouldn't have to eat 400 salads from Subway).

Also, because I knew we'd get tired of cold food, I had to do some serious Internet research about local restaurants and their ingredients. It's amazing to me how much information a place like subway provides about their ingredients, but a place like Chipolte (horribly annoying Web site by the way), who prides itself on fresh Tex-Mex ingredients, fails to mention that they add butter to their rice (fortunately I asked before I added rice to my tacos).

I even made a point of discussing my food allergies with the travel office where I work so that, when they saw I went to several grocery stores (Walmart, Whole Foods, HEB), they wouldn't think I was trying to pay for a month's worth of groceries, but I was in fact paying the excessive amount of moola on allergen-free foods. The travel office ladies were very nice about it, thank the Lord!

In our hotel room, my husband turned the cabinet next to our television into a pantry of snacks and Katherine-friendly, non-refrigerated foods. It looked quite appetizing actually. At the end of the conference day, I'd come back to the hotel, watch TV commercials about pizza, and snack on pico de gio flavored rice chips. Quite yummy!

I even had a backup plan in case I had forgotten our large ice chest. Normally, these fancy hotels have little containers to store ice or chill wine... Yeah, that's right! I've done it before while in San Francisco! They're a great place to at least store some sandwich meat, bag of salad, and some carrots. But thankfully we had a little more room than that in our ice chest.

The only thing I could have done better was stay in a hotel with a kitchenette so we could heat up food. But that was pretty much out of the question for this trip considering the conference was held in downtown Dallas, where only the rich, and obviously, non-kitchenetty people like to stay when in town. I have to say, though, the peeps who cater to the rich really know how to put together an in-hotel fitness center! Lots of treadmills, elliptical, bikes, weight lifting machines, fitness balls, and free weights. It was awesome! Used it every day I was there! And getting a good allergy butt-kicking session in was quite easy.

In a nutshell, that's how I survived my trip last week and didn't once come down with a headache! It may seem like a lot of work and not as much fun as just going out to eat at like where ever, but I enjoyed the trip as a real healthy human being and my husband enjoyed it too.