Friday April 24th 2020

The daily high temperature continues to climb. Today’s high occurred around 4PM. It was in the upper half of the nineties. The current forecast shows an increase in temperature each day through at least Thursday. Several record setting days are possible.

It has been over four weeks since I subjected myself to the circus that is a grocery store, but today I had to make the journey. I’ve been out of bread and milk for more than a week, but I still had plenty of frozen meat, frozen vegetables and pantry goods. The catalyst for the grocery run was water. I was out of bottled drinking water. Consuming large quantities of the tap water in this campground to offset the heat was not a pleasant thought. It tastes terrible.

The shopping experience was not as different as I’d been led to expect by the news coverage. They were regulating the number of people in the store, but there was no wait when I arrived around 10:30AM. The floor had lots of keep your distance decals to remind everyone about social distancing. They had not instituted one way aisles. I wish they had. The shelves were better stocked than a month ago. I found just about everything that I remembered I needed and then some. They didn’t have any paper towels or toilet paper, but I’m not really in need yet. Paper towels may be the next reason I have to return to the Walmart circus in a couple of weeks. Once again I had to buy larger sizes than I would normally purchase. They may be deliberately only stocking the larger sizes. Judging by my checkout receipt, I bought about twice as much as I would on a normal grocery run.

The walk around the grocery store was the substitute for one of today’s walks. It was too hot and sunny for a walk when I got back to the RV park. On my evening walk around the park I found even more residents had departed. The couple from New York across the street were among the departed. They shut up their trailer, took in the utilities, loaded up their SUV and drove away. I didn’t see that one coming.