Chill Out With These Innovative Portable Ice Chests

“The pause that refreshes.” Coca-Cola coined that marketing slogan in 1929, and after a hard ride, it’s a beautiful thing to reach into a cooler and retrieve an icy beverage. (Smart plan: nonalcoholic until the riding’s done!) For a one-day outing, a backpack cooler filled with ice and drinks works fine. Moving on from here, the variety of insulated flip-top coolers is practically endless, with sizes and capacities to suit individuals to entire teams. But there’s another alternative: electric. These obviously require no ice, and draw their needed current from your vehicle’s DC system or household 110-volt AC outlets. Their advantage is that you never need ice, but the disadvantage is, they take time to cool down and require electricity to keep on trucking, er, cooling. Here are three options for that ice-cold travelin’ man.

Whether you ride at the track on a Saturday and then fish on a Sunday, a cooler that can keep all of your items icy cool while providing a hobby-accommodating exterior is a win in our book. You can take a seat on it in the pits while you wait for your next round and then measure your fish with the ruler on the lid the next day. Plus, those drinks will stay cool all weekend long because the manufacturer claims a four-day ice retention.

Go ahead and ask: How many times has our delicious mesquite-smoked sliced turkey become submerged as the ice in our cooler melted late in the day? Answer: Too many to count, thank you. This Engel cooler/dry box lets you avoid a similar sunken-turkey dilemma and instead enjoy that perfect deli sandwich by offering a separate dry box that nestles into the top of the cooler. As planned, this separates the cold wet stuff from the cold dry stuff. That’s more than just smart when you’re on the road, it’s also poultry in motion. Ha, ha, ha!

Once, to surprise our buddies, we packed energy drinks on ice, triple-bagged and stuffed them into our backpack for when we summited a tough trail ride. Well, the drinks arrived semi-cool, and our backside, along with everything else in the backpack, arrived thoroughly wet from melted ice. We could’ve been way smarter, such as with this leakproof nylon Seehonor Insulated Cooler Backpack. It’s a big one, measuring 17.7 inches tall, 13 inches wide, and 7.9 inches deep, and carrying up to 30 cans. Padded shoulder pads improve comfort.