June 9, 2009
All the wise planning in the world will not prevent the regular need to shop for groceries. I suppose we could live on survival rations and buy a year’s supply at a time, but where would be the fun, not to mention the flavor, in that? It is fairly easy to buy fresh meat and produce for about two weeks, but that is very close to the outer limit of both refrigerator space and the life of fresh produce. Meat can last quite a while if frozen, but our marine refrigerator does not reliably freeze things. We try to manage to keep it just at, but not past, the point where things would freeze, and that gives us two weeks or thereabouts with fresh meat.
Eventually the day comes that we have eaten everything in sight and it is time to go shopping. Yesterday was our first shopping day as cruisers. By the time it was over we discovered that we had planned pretty well, but we learned a few new tricks.
In strange places, the first challenge is to discover where the grocery stores are. Cruise guides often include notes that groceries are conveniently near one marina or another, but one still must flesh out that information. For our first go, however, we used information we already had, but for the first time we used it starting at anchor. We had gone into Baltimore on Sunday evening in order to use the Port Networks wifi, but that experiment proved to be a disaster. Nothing worked. However, we anchored in sight of a big Safeway store where we have shopped for years, and that was a good thing.
Come Monday morning, yesterday, we got ready to shop. We started by getting out our shore-shopping backpacks. Each of us has one, and each backpack is stuffed with two big tote bags. Not knowing with certainty how things would go, never having done this before, I dragged out another big tote bag to add to the supply. Into the backpack went my billfold, my shopping list, a pen and some extra index cards. My shopping list always represents some specific meal plans, but in case I find something more appealing than my plan, I use the index cards to record my revised meal plans.
This would be the first time to leave our boathome at anchor in a metropolitan area with nobody aboard. We were a little bit paranoid. We locked up everything, then remembered that we needed something, unlocked, rummaged, and locked up again. Finally, we were ready.
We let down the boarding ladder on the aft deck and pulled the dinghy around. We are still learning this drill, but each time we do it, it is easer. Larry got in first, I handed the bags down to him, and then I boarded. For the short jaunt to the dinghy dock, we didn’t bother with the motor. Larry rowed. He is getting to be pretty good at it!
If boarding the dinghy from the boat is a challenge, debarking from the dinghy at a strange dock is moreso. However, I eventually managed that trick. While I held the dinghy’s painter, Larry ran a cable through the dock structure and locked down the dinghy. Many is the dinghy, both with and without outboard motor, that has disappeared while cruisers shopped or dined out. We knew we could not swim back with our groceries, even though the boat was in clear view from the dock.
As I shopped, the grocery cart grew heavier and heavier. We looked the situation over and worried that we needed to buy more than we could carry back at one trip. We decided to stop without the meat or dairy items. We paid the bill and packed our bags. We were amazed that about $100 worth of produce and assorted other things fit easily into our prepared bags, with bags left over. We walked back to the dinghy dock, just across the street and down a little path.
The next challenge was to get the groceries back to the boat without losing anything in the water. We passed the bags carefully into the dinghy and rowed out to the boat. Holding that dinghy reasonably still and passing the bags up the ladder to the deck is not rocket science, but it does take coordination.
Of course, after lunch, we had to go back to the store and get the rest of our groceries. This time we were familiar with the drill, so it wasn’t such a big deal. It just takes patience and careful handling.
Along the way, we stopped at Starbucks for an iced coffee and a couple of internet hours. I barely got all my uploads and updates done in that amount of time. We probably should have gone there on Sunday night and returned on Monday for another two hours. After all these years of internet on demand 24 hours a day, I have a lot of things I want to do, and I didn’t get all of them done on this trip. This, too, is a learning experience.
Now we are provisioned for two weeks. We ate dinner on the aft deck and watched the sun go down. Tomorrow is a new adventure. What? Where? We will find it out when it happens.
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