Michelle Duggar: How to fill 19 hungry bellies on a road trip

This post was written by Michelle Duggar.

We recently went on book tour with our family on our bus. One of the neat things about this trip was that it was our youngest, Josie's, first road trip with us (and she did really good). Here are some of our favorite snack and meal ideas for road trips.

When it comes to snacks we reuse animal cracker buckets that we get from Sam's, the ones with the screw-on lids. They're airtight, and they're plastic, so they can't break, and they're big. So we usually have a bucket of animal crackers, a bucket of little whales or goldfish, and then a bucket of pretzels. We don't eat a lot of cookies and junk food. Animal crackers, Goldfish and pretzels -- that's the extent of our junk food.

We always try to take dill pickles, because that's our favorite snack. And so we will pack a lot of jars of pickles. We also love green beans, straight out of the can! We drain them, put them on a plate, and we spritz them with vinegar and put a little salt on them. Sounds really crazy, but that's what our kids came up with, and the taste reminds us of pickles.

Beef jerky is a good protein snack that we all like to snack on, but it's expensive, and we can't always do that. So if we get the giant value pack, we can all have just a few bites of beef jerky. It doesn't go very far with as many kids as we have! A number of the kids also love black olives. So we'll have cans of black olives. Usually what we eat is canned, because we don't have a big refrigerator and freezer space on the bus.

Sometimes we eat in the bus because we have a small area in there where we can cook, and it has a little microwave and a small counter space, but it's just really limited to what we consume in there. But we can do Ramen noodles in there. We usually open up some cans of corn and green beans, and then we always have a light fruit cocktail and pineapple.

We also enjoy Indonesian noodles, because our friends Jonathan and Jennifer stayed with us for quite a while, and they introduced us to the Indonesian Ramen-style noodles. And oh, my, that is, a huge favorite, and it's so easy, and it has six grams of protein. I have a little coffee machine that we take with us on the road, and you can just push the button for hot water, and each person gets a cup. We put the noodles in there and then pour the hot water in, and they're ready, just like that.

So there are a few ideas for anyone traveling with their kids this summer.

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