Review: Yeti Roadie 20 Cooler

Keepin' it Cool

Being outdoors means having a decent cooler to keep your stuff from turning into a puddle of hot, disgusting mush on a humid Tennessee day. When I first started kayaking, I bought a cooler from a local big-box store. Let me just say this much. It didn't work out too well. Sure, most typical coolers are cheap, but let's keep in mind the fact you seriously get what you pay for. I got tired of my ice being melted before lunchtime when I would be out on the water, and soggy sandwhiches are really no fun.

After a few let downs with some typical coolers which shall remain nameless...I ponied up for a new Yeti Roadie 20 cooler. OK, I actually begged my mother to buy one for me for Christmas last year, so she did. Under the tree was my new, beautiful cooler in a perfect neutral tan color. It was love at first sight. I actually remember sitting on the cooler opening my other gifts and handing out gifts to family members. I guess somehow mom thought I was worth spending $200 bucks or so on a cooler the size of a small microwave.

The first actual test of the Yeti Roadie 20 was when my husband and I took a drive down to New Orleans last April. I had a week off from work, so we decided a road trip was in order. We packed some ice in the Yeti and put it in the backseat of our car and took off on a 500 mile journey which took us the better part of eight hours to drive. When we arrived in our hotel room at the Sheraton on Canal Street in New Orleans, we were shocked to open the Yeti and find that we still had cold Coca-Cola products. But wait! There's more! We even had solid pieces of ice. Not ice water mind you, but ICE. The ice we took from our freezer at home in Tennessee had lived to see the state of Louisiana.

Here's the good stuff to know about the Yeti Roadie 20 on a road trip (maybe that's how it got it's name). The thing will keep your grub refrigerator cold. We only had to change the ice about once every three days in the cool confines of the hotel room. And it wasn't like we were piling it full of ice either. We only put ice in about one-fourth of the way up the cooler and it was perfectly efficient.

A negative when traveling this cooler? It is HEAVY. Can you say heavy? Loaded with food in it, it's even heavier. And I don't mean loaded with a rack of ribs or a few lobsters, I mean loaded with regular stuff like soda cans and some sandwhiches.

One other thing I'm not totally in love with on the Yeti is the handle. You have to really give it a firm whack to put the handle down. It certainly stays in place when it's in the lifted position. To lower the handle, you have to let it know who is boss. Raising the handle can be just as awkward. You have to exert enough force on it to make it come back up, only to hear this annoyingly loud pop when it snaps into the locked position so you can carry it. The handle is probably my biggest gripe with the cooler. If the handle was a smoother mechanism to operate, I think it would be easier to, you know...carry.

But how does it perform outdoors, you ask? My husband and I take the Yeti on our boat and our kayaks on day trips in some really hot temps during the summer months. The Yeti keeps ice all day long, and our food can stay just as cold as if it were in the comfy confines of our kitchen fridge. I have gotten ice out of the Yeti on boat trips six hours into a trip with 98 degree weather and still had solid, frozen ice. Bottom line, stuff stays cold. The Yeti Roadie 20 also makes for a pretty decent seat. In our boat, my legs get tired of being scruntched up in the front seating area, so I sometimes sit back further and use the Yeti as a seating surface. I haven't forked over the $79 fee that Sea Dek asks for a pad cut to fit the small top of the Yeti Roadie 20, so I improvise and put a floatation device/seat cushion on top of it and it works out just fine.

In the aspect of keeping your food and drinks cold, the Yeti Roadie 20 does it's job. It would probably be the perfect cooler if only it liked to be carried. That handle and I may never get along.