Published on December 7, 2025 2:01 AM GMT
On a road trip there are a few common options for food:
Bring food
Grocery stores
Drive throughs
Places that take significant time to prepare food
Bringing food or going to a grocery store are the cheapest (my
preference!) but the kids are hard enough to feed that we often buy
prepared food when we’re traveling. [1] And they often prefer food
that takes a while to make (usually pizza) over what you can get in a
drive through. A couple years ago I realized there’s another option:
calling in an order for pickup to where you’ll be soon.
We’ll use Google Maps “search along route” to identify a place ~30min
out, and phone in an order. [2] By the time we arrive, the food is ready.
We can combine the speed (and buffer maximization)
benefits of drive throughs, with the variety of options from the wide
range of restaurants that offer pickup.
[1] I’m also working on getting them to do better with brought food,
but I’m focusing on lunch at school here because that’s a much larger
portion of their food away from home.
[2] It kind of amazes me that pizza places will take the costly action
of preparing a pizza to my specifications based on a simple phone
call, with no contact information beyond me giving a first name. I
mean, it’s great, but like so many things in our society it only works
because there are extremely few people want to cause havoc and are
willing to put any effort into doing so.
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