Celiac Travel Guide
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If you have celiac disease, traveling always takes twice as much research as for those without restrictions. You can’t just fly by the seam of your pants without risking spending your vacation sick. We’ve come up with some traveling tips for those with celiac disease to help simplify your trip planning experience.
Pack Plenty of Road Snacks
Unless you live in California, celiac-safe gluten-free fast food simply doesn’t exist. Pre-empt this catastrophe by packing your food for the road.
Make gluten-free sandwiches, chop veggies or fruit, get pretzels, fruit cups, apple sauce, various nuts (Planter’s are usually safe!), and they even make gluten-free Ritz alternatives now (like the Ritz Bits Cheese and Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers). There are plenty of options to simplify the road trip portion of your vacation.
Make a Safe Restaurant List
Before you leave, research all the celiac-safe restaurants in the vicinity of your destination and prep a list of restaurants to which you can easily refer. Doing this will help to give you the closest thing you can get to the care-free, spontaneous vacation experience. Below are some tips for effectively researching celiac-safe restaurants:
Find Me Gluten Free
I start all my gluten-free restaurant searches on findmeglutenfree.com. This website basically works as a social media for those who keep to a gluten-free diet to find safe food. When you sign up for this website, you have the option of listing whether or not you have celiac disease (when reading reviews, I usually pay the most attention to the users labeled “celiac” when they mention getting sick at a restaurant).
When you choose to review a website, you get to rate it based on its gluten-free accommodations and safety. If you have celiac disease, you want to focus on “celiac friendly” or “celiac safe” ratings predominately, though some rated “gluten-free options” are fine too. This website lists gluten-free restaurants by location. When you look at restaurants on these lists, it’s important to read the reviews and follow-up with more research. Getting sick on vacation is not worth it for a little bit of laziness.
Fact Check
Once you’ve built your starter list of celiac-safe restaurants using Find Me Gluten Free, you need to fact check each restaurant on your list. While Find Me Gluten Free is a great site, there are a lot of restaurants listed because they simply offer gluten-free, meaning they aren’t always celiac safe. The best way to determine if the places you’ve found are in fact gluten-free is to scour the internet for reviews, blog posts, and information provided by the restaurant online to determine if the restaurant is, in fact, celiac-safe. You could always call the restaurants to help determine if they’re celiac safe.
Be Prepared to Talk to the Manager
While your research can be extremely helpful and may even lead you in the right direction, it’s always good to talk to the manager when you get to the restaurant and ensure your safety in eating there. If they don’t sound like they know what they’re talking about, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. Going hand in hand with this is preparing yourself for the potential of leaving the restaurant and eating elsewhere, to save yourself the sickness.
Take a Doctor’s Note When Flying
It may sound a little silly, but taking a doctor’s note with you if you’re flying can actually save you a lot of heartbreak. Gluten-Free Globetrotter recently posted an article about how having a doctor’s note declaring your celiac disease and need for safe, gluten-free food can allow you to board the plane with your snacks from home! This could be a game-changer for those with celiac disease, making airport cross-contamination or spending far too much money for a small snack there a thing of the past.
Always be Prepared
The absolute key to having the most authentic vacation experience despite having celiac disease is coming prepared to everything. If you’re planning a day at a theme park or the beach, pack a lunch and snacks to ensure you’re covered in case there are no safe options for you. If you have your heart set on eating somewhere, call in advance and make sure the kitchen can accommodate your dietary restrictions. Some places may surprise you; Disney, for example, has quite a few celiac options in most of their restaurant; they’re very allergy-conscious on the whole.
Be Wary
If you have any suspicions or uneasiness about eating at a particular restaurant, err on the safe side and don’t eat it. It’s better to miss out on a meal than miss out on a day or two of your vacation; it’s just not worth it to eat at a restaurant if you’re going to be miserably sick.
Overall, successfully traveling with celiac is beyond easy to accomplish by planning ahead and packing food in advance. It can be slightly challenging, but with a little careful planning and the willingness to be flexible, you can successfully have a relatively normal vacation experience despite your celiac disease. We hope this guide has been helpful; happy vacations and safe eating, friends!