The best part of traveling as a little kid was helping my mother fill up the cooler. Our cooler was big, green and made out of metal. It had a tray in it for things that we didn’t want to get wet (a fantasy that they would stay dry). The ice came from the ice house where we bought it big blocks that the men who worked there lifted with giant tongs. My mother broke it apart with an ice pick. We filled the cooler mostly with Coca-Colas and loaded the tray with things to use to make sandwiches and for snacks.
We also always took a water jug with us. The water jug was also metal and had a spout on the top. My mother would keep the water jug on the floor in the front seat and each time anyone wanted water, she would lift up the cooler and hold it precariously above her lap while pouring into a paper cup.
Maintaining the cooler and water jug was just part of traveling. Once each day we would have to refresh the ice in both. That required finding an ice house and buying ice, emptying the cooler and draining it and refilling it with ice, as well as refreshing the ice in the water jug.
Whether our destination was Panama City, Florida, a day trip away from Birmingham, or the west coast on a multi-day marathon, the cooler and the water jug were essential. Even driving through the Mojave Desert in summer in an un-air conditioned car, we always had a Cold Coke and some cheese (albeit sometimes a bit waterlogged) to nibble on. If the radiator overheated, our water jug was always ready.
As I grew older, the ice house gave way to the ice machine at the motel or hotel or sometimes bagged ice from the convenience store. The cooler went from metal to plastic and grew a drain on the side at the bottom. The contents remained the same. And I was no longer a child, but a teenager, then a young adult.
When I married, we got our own cooler. It was plastic and orange and it served us well. The Cokes gave way to Diet Coke and Ginger Ale, and cheese went from slices to blocks of cheddar we cut with a cheese cutter.
When we drove cross country in 1972 with our infant son, we used the ice chest to help create a “nest” for him in the backseat. In those days, carseats were not required, although we had one on one side of the backseat. But when he was in his “nest” (created by making a upholstered and padded plywood floor to slide in between the passenger seat and back seat cushion), he was free to move about and play with his toys. About 2/3 of the way through our three week multi-stop route that took us from California to New York, to Alabama and back to California, he discovered how to fling himself across the cooler and steal my sunglasses. Somehow we made it home.
About that same time, we discovered a water jug that was a quantum leap over all of the water jugs of the past. You pressed a button on the top and pumped the water up. We got two of them, one for us and one for my parents. My mother was growing frailer and lifting the water jug was too hard for her. My parents have been gone for more than two decades, but we still have their water jug and ours!
We also discovered the solution for short trips. It was an armrest cooler that sat on the bench seat of my 1977 Pontiac. We still have that one too though we never use it. We don’t have a car with a bench seat. But you never know...
The orange cooler eventually developed a leak, as did the green one that came after it. We then bought a blue cooler and a big red one with wheels on one end. We also bought a couple of those smaller coolers. One had a long life between the bucket seats of the Dodge caravan as a repository for maps. Sometimes on the road cooler crises required us to buy Styrofoam coolers. There is nothing quite as annoying as a squeaky Styrofoam cooler. But you never know when you might need one, so we keep any that enter our lives.
We have our collection of coolers and it sits atop the cabinets in the garage. For parties we fill the blue one with sodas and water and the bigger red one with beer. The rest sit there and wait in anticipation.
Somewhere along the way, we acquired two very large plastic water jugs with spigots. I think they were leftover from my camp director days – bought with my own money because the camp was too poor to buy them. Sometimes my daughter-in-law borrows them. For the last hurricane, we filled them with water – just in case.
But times have changed. Now we have bag coolers on wheels and bag coolers in different sizes as shoulder totes. I use my coolers for various events that I host, either personally or for my clients. I fill up coolers with iced drinks for bus tours and picnics. All of this stuff also comes in handy when the power goes out, which seems to happen all too frequently. I also find the bag coolers on wheels are great way to carry trade show items onto the floor.
Our approach to road trips has changed. We no longer head cross country for three weeks. Instead we fly someplace we want to be, and it is often a foreign country, and we rent a car. We don’t take a cooler with us. If I am thirsty, I will grab a bottle of water at the gas station when we gas up the car. Eating and traveling by car are no longer simultaneous tasks. We would much prefer to stop for lunch at local place that gets good reviews—which is easily determined by checking the Internet on my phone.
I admit to having an assortment of small bag coolers and when we do travel in our own car, I confess to chilling down some bottled waters and sodas. I get some ice from the freezer section of the refrigerator by sticking a plastic bag under the chute. I might even put some cheese and crackers in another small cooler bag. So, two small bags, some ice from the freezer and I am good to go. I could have left it at that.
During the last power failure I bought an ice chest that plugs into the cigarette lighter on a car. It seemed like a good idea at the time. What I didn’t count on was that in order to keep the cooler, cool, I had to keep the car in motion. It wasn’t like I could chill it down on a short trip, load it up with stuff from the refrigerator, and keep everything cool. I didn’t take it back. Instead I put it in the storage unit.
I have to say that my parents’ lives would have been a lot simpler with such an amazing device. They could have plugged it into the cigarette lighter and then carried it into the motel room each night and plugged it in. We could have had cold Cokes and our cheese would have never been waterlogged. So I solved their soggy cheese problem. It only took 60 years!
But the old pump top water jugs-- maybe I should use one of those on our next trip? I realize that bottled water is environmentally unfriendly, but it is so convenient. But I could take that old water jug, fill it with water and ice (filtered, of course, through our reverse osmosis system) and bring along some paper cups and make time almost stand still.
But the real question is, will a cooler filled with sodas and cheese and a water jug bring back the wonder of travel that I experienced as a small child? That is, sadly, gone forever.
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