Tuesday September 19th 2017

The temperature got down into the 50s overnight, but was back into the high 80s this afternoon. That pattern is forecast to continue until the Thursday. Then a cold front will pass through that will drop the temperatures ten degrees or so. It isn’t going to rain so any temperature is fine.

If I were at Disney World, I’d say this was a hidden Mickey. Here it’s just another cactus along the trail.

Today was a shopping day in town. The Home Depot, Walmart and Safeway were easy to find. I had actually passed them on my way into town on Sunday. The only place I actually bought anything was Walmart and that was mostly groceries. I stopped at Home Depot to look for a portable gas grill to replace mine. I’ve known it was on its last legs since last fall. It is finally reached a condition that impacts how it cooks food. Home Depot is pushing the big backyard units and didn’t have much of a selection in the portable size. I’m going to have to look at camping and sporting goods stores, or order online when I’m in one location long enough.

Shopping in Walmart today was a long slow process. I entered on the home goods side and wandered through everything else before I got to the grocery section at the opposite end of the store. I picked up a couple of things, but my cart was still pretty empty when I got to the grocery section.

Now that I’m back in Arizona some of the brands are more familiar. From my experience, the distribution chain that supplies the Walmarts in Utah, Idaho and Montana is different from Arizona. Today I even found a can of B&M baked beans. Something I haven’t seen since I left New England.

This Walmart had a manager that liked to use the public address system. He kept calling for some poor husband to meet his wife in the produce department. It was repeated so many times I started to think it was a code. The next series of announcements was calling for all available cashiers to the checkouts. By the time I got ready to checkout most of the registers were staffed, but the lines were still four and five deep. I didn’t see that many people in the store. It took twenty minutes from the time I got in line to the time I reached my car. I’m still not sure what was really going on in the store.

Sunset out my front door.

My leisurely approach to shopping combined with Walmart’s not so speedy checkouts, took up three hours of my day. By the time I got the food back to my RV home, it was too late to do anything significant. I settled for another walk along the trails in the state park.