Do you travel with food allergies?

After the joys and hassles of another international trip in gluten free style, I want to know how others handle traveling with dietary restrictions.

I'm not a group tour kind of girl, but was surprised to find out there are Gluten Free travel tours available. This could be a great solution for some, but does not address the needs of business or independent travelers, or people traveling out of necessity.

Yesterday, I met a woman at the health food store whose son has autism and can't eat gluten or casein. They don't do much traveling, which she said would be overwhelming, but have to make a regular five-hour car trip. She packs sandwiches for him and they have a restaurant en route that takes extra care in preparing her son's food.

If you travel with a limited diet, do you pack everything you will need from home, plan out your stops in advance, or use phone apps to find restaurants?

I actually brought a portable electric burner with me to the Caribbean, but this did not turn out to be such a good idea.

Have you ever stayed at home because of dietary restrictions?

Do you have tips that would make life easier for others traveling with food allergies or sensitivities?

Please leave a comment or email me at joanie.conwell@gmail.com and tell me what kind of traveling you do and how you do it.

Allergy cards

If you have food sensitivities and are traveling abroad, bringing a food allergy card in the local language can go a long way to ease the mind. A number of companies offer these portable cards. A few are available for free with a suggested donation, the rest start at around $8. Laminated cards hold up to more wear and tear than plain paper stock, but it is easy to laminate printed cards yourself.

Common sense dictates that it is advisable to verify that the translation on your card is correct, particularly if you have not dealt with a company before. I cannot vouch for the reliability of any company or translation.

Here are a few of the companies and health programs producing allergy translation cards:

Select Wisely
* Translation into 48 languages
* Strongly worded cards for people with life threatening sensitivities.
* Cards for nuts and shellfish, and multiple food allergies.
* Gluten intolerance cards.
* Lactose intolerance cards.
* Diabetic emergency and pharmacy cards.
* Latex and Penicillin allergy cards
* Vegetarian and Vegan cards.
* Special order customized cards.

Dietary Card out of the UK offers a similar range of service s as Select Wisely.

Allergy Translation
* Allergy translation cards for 175 foods in 27 languages. Costs $8.
These are not laminated cards. You print them directly from your computer.

Gluten Free restaurant Cards
* Celiac / gluten-free restaurant cards in 48 languages, to print out on your computer. Free with $5 suggested donation.

Diabetes Health Record (DHR) Card
* These cards created by the California Diabetes Program are a great self management tool, with space for recording tests and results. Available for free in English and 18 other languages.

Lactofree Translation Card
Lactose intolerance cards available from Lactofree as a free pdf file in French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, German, and Norwegian.

What's this blog about?

Whether you have diabetes or celiac disease, a peanut allergy or lactose intolerance, you still love to travel. The goal of this blog is to make travel easier for you, when you travel for business or adventure, alone or with family.

The idea came about because I believe that food sensitivities should not be an impediment to seeing the world.

Searching the internet, I found many resources on traveling with various food sensitivities, but even the most polished looking among them was incomplete. Some of the gluten-free travel sites, for example, offer reviews of restaurants in major European cities like Paris or Rome, but no information about traveling even slightly off the beaten path. There are tips and tricks to traveling with ease, and soon they will be featured here.

My intention is not to reinvent the wheel but to aggregate the best information on the web about traveling with dietary restrictions. This will be a work in progress for some time, so please bear with me. If you have a resource to share, I'd love to know about it.

Bon voyage!