In The Kitchen with Laura McKenna: Road Trip Cooler Trick

Keep your cooler chilled without ice with this awesome trick.

As you prepare for your next road trip, forget filling your cooler with ice. It’s too messy and once it starts melting, everything inside runs the risk of getting soggy.  Plus, ice never seems to stay super cold in regular coolers.

What about ice packs?   Those will be a little less messy but they still don’t last long enough to keep everything ice cold.

Trust me when I tell you that I paid a lot of money to learn this cooler/ice hack.  Literally, thousands of dollars.   But lots of money and a lot more pain later, I’m sharing this LIFE SAVING trick with you!   

Ok, so maybe this won’t save your life but it sure will keep your drinks and snacks cold on a long road trip.

See it all started in 2020 when I had knee surgery.  (Also, I have to tell you: TAKE CARE OF YOUR KNEES!  You want to avoid knee surgery if at all possible!   You don’t want the pain of recovery and you don’t want the bill, either.)     

After surgery, they sent me home with what I called my “Ice Machine”.  Think of it as a small cooler with a hose that ran from the cooler to this weird lily pad looking thing.   The lily pad fit into my knee brace and when the cooler was filled with ice and water, the ice machine would pump that ice water to inflate the lily pad and the constant icy water cycle would continue.    Looking back, I honestly don’t know how I would have survived without it.

But as I was leaving the hospital that day, the surgical recovery nurse told me that if I tried to constantly fill the cooler with ice cubes, “I’d go broke” and that my freezer won’t be able to keep up making enough of it.      

She then let me in on this great little secret:   Freeze bottles of Gatorade.

We used the mini bottles since the ice machine was small.  But let me tell you, they’d stay frozen all night.  Before bed, we’d take a few bottles out of the freezer and place them into my ice machine and fill the rest of the cooler with water.   By the time morning rolled around, everything was still icy.

So fast forward a few years and I still use this Gatorade bottle trick anytime I travel.  I always grab a yellow 6 or 8 pack of Gatorade mini bottles to use as ice packs in the cooler. Yellow doesn’t freeze any better or worse than the other colors, I just like the taste of the original full-strength yellow kind best.

Freeze them solid for a few days beforehand and then place them inside your cooler as you would a normal ice pack.   I don’t know what the magical potion is inside Gatorade that keeps it so frozen for so long (and maybe I don’t want to know) but it works great!    

On my most recent road trip, I had veggies and dip in some containers along with bottles of water.    I placed the frozen Gatorade bottles around everything and 10 hours later, I arrived home with everything just as cold as when I took off! The next morning? They Gatorades were still partially frozen.

The great part is, the Gatorade never expands inside the bottle so you don’t even need to open the containers or drink any out to allow for freezing room.   Nope!   Just pop them right into your freezer, freeze ’em solid, and then place them right into your cooler.  

Try it on your next trip and let me know how long they stayed frozen.  I bet it’ll be quite some time!    You can use any color/flavor you like.  I just prefer the plain old yellow.   But pick your favorite because you can drink it after the trip is over, too!

Safe travels this summer!

Want to contact Laura McKenna about a little trick you swear by? Anything else on your mind? Email anytime, she’d love to hear from you: [email protected]
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