Vacations, whether they are to Disneyland or another favorite spot, are expensive. Hotels and motels aren’t cheap and when you add in all of the other expenses of travel, vacations can put a strain on the old pocket book. 

In order to make vacations a little easier to afford, we try to bring food with us to enjoy in the hotel room, especially breakfast items and snacks. When it comes to the food in the room, we try to keep it simple. While many, perhaps even most, rooms in the Disneyland Resort area come with a small refrigerator, we try to not to bring anything that needs refrigeration in the case that we are delayed in getting to our room. When it comes to snacks, we like to bring:

While it may not seem easy, there are a lot of ways to have a good breakfast without leaving your hotel room. Some of my favorite hotel breakfast items include:

• Bananas and apples.
• Applesauce, especially the types in the squeezable pouches like the Mott’s Snack and Go pouches.
• Cereal that comes in those convenient single-serving bowls. They can be eaten with or without milk and also serve as a great snack while in the park.
• Cereal bars and granola bars.

Above all, my kids’ favorite hotel breakfast is oatmeal. I make oatmeal without a microwave using the room’s coffee maker. To make the oatmeal, I run a cycle through the machine without coffee to rinse the coffee taste out of the machine and then use the water from a second cycle to make the kids’ instant oatmeal. I make the oatmeal in the cups provided by the hotel and use plastic spoons from home. (And yes, I wipe the cups out well afterward so that I’m not leaving the housekeepers with a crusty oatmeal mess.) The instant oatmeal provides the kids a warm breakfast before a big day and saves us a lot of money on restaurant breakfasts.