Cooler Blanket?

I've seen some neat mods on other (national) boards where the people made cooler covers out of refletix. They swear they help a lot. Some even make cooler liners instead of cooler covers and these reportedly also work well. This will be on my list for this season. I've got a piece of refletix left over that should do the job.

I've also seen people using frozen water bottles instead of ice. This keeps the hotdogs and such from falling down into the meltwater and turning gross. I like the idea of having the meltwater contained in the water bottles. This would also make room in the cooler, as I wouldn't have to have water bottles and ice. I wish my cooler had a little shelf, but this sounds like it will work just fine.

How do you keep the hotdogs and such out of the melt water?
Have you tried a cooler cover?

Here's the link to the other site: http://www.popupportal.com/index.php?topic=42742.msg299975#msg299975

There's a pic of what I'm talking about at the bottom of the page in this link: http://www.popupportal.com/index.php?topic=41933.msg304716#msg304716

We always freeze several bottles of water before each trip. Then, as they melt, we will add some ice, and drink the water or use it for coffee!

We also use a few of the freeze packs along with the frozen water.

If you keep the hot dogs in a zip bag, or cheese and anything else that is partially open, they won't get nasty even if they are submerged in water.

I try to keep the stuff in zip locks, Dave, but something always seems to either get nasty, or turn the melt water nasty. I have the 3-way fridge, and try to use it mostly for the soft drinks, waters and juices. That way the kids stay out of the cooler.

of course theres usually just me.. but I seem to have plenty of room for all the food and water bottles in the fridge and/or freezer. I like to keep the cooler iced down though for a cold beer or two.

chuck wrote:of course theres usually just me.. but I seem to have plenty of room for all the food and water bottles in the fridge and/or freezer. I like to keep the cooler iced down though for a cold beer or two.

Watch out Chuck, Richard might just take your offer on a cold beer.

I've got a pretty good size fridge, so we use a cooler just for drinks. When we dry camped at Elkmont, we didn't even use the fridge - wanted to keep the battery for the fan since it was so dang hot and humid! We have a 5 day Coleman and we replaced ice on the 3rd day. Most of our food was frozen, so that helped keep most of the stuff cold. We only took 1 cooler with food and drinks. If we ever do that again (truly doubt it, I like my creature comforts too much), I will make sure we have one cooler for drinks and one for food. We opened and closed it too much for the ice to stay frozen.