A mammoth shopping

Wundowie — 2000-04-18

The preparations are taking a quantum leap ahead today as Jo, Tom, Tanja and I are going to Midland to buy the entire expedition food supply for the first 9 months. For weeks, Tanja has been busy working out the details of our food requirement. You can hardly imagine the mass of food a person eats in such a period of time. The list she compiled with the various products covers more than eleven sheets of paper.

By the way, the supermarket manager of Cooles in Midland was the only manager of all supermarket chains to make any concessions at all. Anyway, we are treated kindly and one of the employees helps us fill one shopping cart after the other to the brim, which takes us all day. The ever-cheerful couple Jo and Tom again proves to be an indispensable support in this important stage of the preparations.

At the check-out counter the cashier smiles and says that this was the biggest shopping she has seen in her 10 years on the job. The bill comes to 5000 dollars. An impressive sum, but considering that we are now in a position to feed three persons for nine months, it doesn’t look so bad any more.

In the late afternoon we roll 19 shopping carts out to the car park. Lots of passers-by stop and stare astonished at this mammoth shopping. They want to know what we need this enormous amount of food for. When Jo tells them what we plan to do they wish us luck, and that is one thing we are going to need indeed. It takes us over an hour to pack the contents of 19 shopping carts into Jo’s and Tom’s trailer, the Yud and our Holden. Exhausted but in good spirits we drive the precious load to our base camp at Wundowie.