Menu-Planning for Vacation: 8 Quick and Easy Lunches

I'm just barely squeaking this into our month of talking about vacation and travel food!  I hope you enjoyed our July theme!

Before we go on vacation, I plan our suppers pretty carefully.  Breakfast and lunch are more of a free-for-all, but they still require some planning on my part.  After all, if I don't remember to take bread, sandwiches are out of the question!

When planning our lunch food, I keep these things in mind:

• It needs to be fast.  As in, grab-it-quick-on-the-way-to-the-beach fast.
• It needs to be easy.  I'm on vacation too!
• It's OK if it doesn't win Healthy Lunch of the Year Award.  Sometimes, we just eat snacks for lunch.  The occasional junk food lunch on vacation won't hurt us.  

Here are a few lunch ideas to get you started.  Some of them are pretty basic, but maybe you'll find something ground-breaking on this list.  Keep in mind that we do not eat ALL of this stuff every time we go on vacation, but I bring the ingredients/parts for quite a few of them.  After all, when we're on vacation, it's all about having options, right?

1.  Crackers, sliced cheese, and sliced deli sausage.  I slice up the cheese and half a log of sausage before we leave home so that lunch can be quick!

2.  Melted cheese tortilla roll-ups.  Sprinkle shredded cheese on a tortilla, warm it up in the microwave on 70% power until the cheese is melted, top with a slice of deli meat, and roll it up.

3.  Any sort of leftovers, especially the sandwich-type ones (chicken wraps, Pork BBQ)

4.  Sandwiches on mini sub buns.  I buy a bag of 8 mini sub buns and use them to make sandwiches before we leave.  A scraping of butter or margarine helps keep the bread from getting soggy, and then they are individually packaged and frozen.  Add lettuce and tomato after thawing, if desired,.

5.  Chicken nuggets, cheese sticks, microwaveable soft pretzels, hotdogs, etc.  Add a piece of fruit to soothe your guilty conscience :)

6.  Carrots and ranch dip, string cheese

7.  PB&J (duh)

8.  Leftover pasta salad

What are your favorite zero-effort vacation lunches?