Picky traveler pays $400 to bring a snack-filled suitcase — plus a George Foreman Grill — on vacation: ‘I like my home comforts’
There’s no place like home for a holiday.
Many people can feel homesick while on vacation, but perhaps none as much as this poor fellow.
UK resident John Phillips reportedly spends around $400 to bring a suitcase filled with noodles, chips, and even a George Foreman Grill on trips to enjoy his favorite foods while on the road.
“I like my home comforts when I go abroad,” the 40-year-old fuss traveler told Kennedy News and Media. “So instead of searching for decent food, I’ll just take my own food with me.”
During a trip to Egypt last year, the persnickety Brit and his wife Rebecca, 29, reportedly brought 21 cups of instant noodles, 86 bags of chips, two packets of bacon, a pack of 30 sausages, cans of tuna, a block of cheese and brown sauce.
That’s not all: they also lugged 30 McVitie’s Club biscuit bars, 16 bags of “sweets” and oodles of breakfast bars.
A video of their portable pantry boasts more than 200,000 views on Rebecca’s TikTok channel, according to Kennedy News.
This snack pack cost the family around $380 — including the charge for an extra bag — on top of the $1,781 they paid for an all-inclusive vacation package.
The truck driver trainer sometimes even packs a George Foreman Grill so he can enjoy bacon and sausage sandwiches while abroad.
Unfortunately, John’s picky eating habits mean his wife is often relegated to dining alone.
“I go on holiday and I eat anything, but he just won’t,” lamented Rebecca, who says her partner has brought his own food abroad for as long as she can remember.
“When we first met and we first started going away, he would just eat chips,” Rebecca said. “Then we started taking stuff on holiday with us and it just accumulated.”
The couple reportedly started by taking packaged noodles, then tacked on sweets and breakfast bars and then packets of chips so he could get a taste of home on their two-week jaunts.
When that wasn’t enough, they even started packing meat.
“We put ice packs in food containers and put the meat in,” Rebecca said. “We didn’t know if it would work but it did. When we got the food out after the flight, it was still really cold.”
She says the monumental hassle is worth it, as she wouldn’t “enjoy the holiday if he wasn’t eating.”
“He will only eat the food we’ve brought,” she said. “If he comes down to the hotel restaurant with me, he might pick at some bread. We’ve been on boat trips before, and I’ve taken a Pot Noodle with us.”
Naturally, refusing to try new things might seem to defeat the purpose of travel; however, John at least goes for the “free beer at the all-inclusive,” he revealed.
“The food doesn’t really matter to me,” declared the culinary philistine, who’s been fussy since he was little, preferring to eat chips, sausage and other English staples.
He summed up his peculiar travel habit: “Why go on holiday and worry about the food when I can take it with me?”
His wife, for one, says she’s grown used to John’s gastronomic reticence.
“It doesn’t annoy me,” she claimed. “It’s just a normal lifestyle to us now. I don’t think he’ll change — this is it now.”
