Five days without a kitchen

We are heading out for a vacation! Every time we've gone out of town since we started Ellie on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and then GAPS she's gotten sick. So it's an understatement to say I've been a little anxious about heading out of town. I actually didn't want to take this trip at all. Ian is going to San Diego for a work conference and he spent months trying to talk me into going along. I told him it would be impossible with our diet ... but Portland has been incredibly gray this summer and finally on a very rainy July day I relented and told him to get us tickets. :)

Both times we've traveled in the past seven months we've had a kitchen. I put tons of work into preparing foods in advance, packed frozen meals, etc. And none of it mattered because she got sick anyway. I was miserable on both trips. I'm still not sure why the first trip went awry. It was back on the SCD and we packed dripped yogurt so as to get more yogurt in less space. Knowing what I know now, I wonder if the dripped yogurt was harder for Ellie to digest because of the concentrated amount of fat. But there is also the fact that we were drinking tap water back then and we were in LA, where the tap water is especially toxic. And the fact that the hotel room's kitchen had lemon dishwasher detergent. Many, many possibilities. The second trip was much more cut and dried. Ellie got sick with a stomach virus after swallowing a mouthful of kiddie pool water on the first day of the trip.

So this time around we decided to just say screw it. We didn't book a room with a kitchen. I'm not overzealously packing food ... just a couple quarts of chicken broth, some canned salmon and some veggies and berries to make smoothies in the blender. We are planning to eat at restaurants, order as cautiously as we can and keep our fingers crossed for the best.

I know we all need a vacation from the cooking, dishwashing and stressing that this diet brings along with it. I'm hoping that Ellie does well and that - if she doesn't - that her mama can roll with it and have some fun anyway.