Thursday October 3rd 2019

The temperature reached seventy during the afternoon. Unfortunately, the wind decided to blow the heat away. A twenty mile per hour wind with gusts higher kept the outside temperature uncomfortable.

I spent some time this afternoon wandering in and out of stores in the South Reno area. Some call that shopping, but since I didn’t buy anything it was just an indoor hike without the scenery. My last stop was at Walmart to restock my food supply.

As usual I had a few observations about the Walmart experience. This is the first Walmart I visited in more than two months that wasn’t in Oregon or Washington. I have clearly switched to a different distribution district. Some of the product choices that weren’t available or different in the Northwest states are back to the ones I’m more familiar with here. The choices in the bread aisle stand out as an example. The primary bread choice is back to Natures Own and Thomas English Muffins dominate the choice in that category. In the dairy area the eggs are again presented in blue foam packaging rather than white cardboard.

One “first” I observed in Walmart was security packaging on meats. Many of the expensive packaged meats had yellow plastic security devices in the packaging. Looking around the store I saw several other obvious security measures. There were one way gates at the entrance and reminders about surveillance cameras in many areas. I believe I was in the same store two years ago and didn’t notice the heavy security measures. The area seems fairly affluent, so I’m not sure what issues might have caused the increase.

I got back to the campground in time to be caught in a line of campers checking in to the park. There are more residents tonight than there have been since the weekend. It is hard to believe that the next weekend starts tomorrow. The cold temperatures have kept my focus and let the week slip by.