Team Dream Catcher was up and at it early. I had the Amy unit semi-conscious in the Amy-mobile and heading out towards Greenville by 8 am this morning, which is a personal best on board.
By 9:30 we arrived at our first stop, Sam's Club, It took two hours and we entirely fill our cart, but we managed to procure everything on the provisioning list. Final total was 540 bucks, which is a lot, but not in the context of 8 months worth of durable goods and 4 months worth of cheeses and meats.
You can actually take off another 100 from the 540 for an external USB powered, 1.5 terabyte drive that I got to back up all of our movies and e-books on. Considering that, we're down to a paltry 440, which while still a lot of money, it's some 20% less than we spent last year to complete the same pre-departure provisioning run.
Anyhow, after squeezing all our purchases into the ghetto ride, we headed next door to Lowes. At Lowes we scored some wood trim to finish the guest stateroom, some pine hobby board so I can build Amy a new storage unit in the weasel room and a new faucet fixture for the galley.
It might seem weird to some that we use a house hold faucet on a boat, but the quality and price are actually better than what the marine industry offers. Amy and the Lowes Faucet specialist lady spent thirty minutes deciding on which faucet we needed while I sat with the cart. In the end, this is the model we selected and I will be installing it in the next few days.
From Lowes we headed over to the evil empire of all things wireless, Verizon. I had finally had enough of their half assed coverage for my $60 a month data card that only works 2 days a month and so armed with my witty banter and the clever use of blunt force trauma I made the bastards cancel my service and I now hope that those price-gouging data monkey whores rot in hell.
For the record, I hate you Verizon. I hate you so much.
From Verizon we traveled to Walmart to pick up a printer toner cartridge as well as a new audio cable for our Ipod to stereo connection. I'm not sure why, but the Ipod seems to eat one audio cable per year regardless of how well we treat it or how much we use it. Perhaps it's one of those immutable laws of physics? Maybe?
Our final destination for today's shopping spree was Batteries Plus where we scored a new $40 battery for Amy's good camera that I am not allowed to use. Hopefully this means you will be seeing some higher quality photos coming soon to a blog near you.
We retraced our path home and arrived just in time for the rain. We grabbed the perishables and ran for the boat and after unpacking, separating, re-packing and finally storing all our stuff, I made the crew meatballs for dinner.
We ate over a nice bottle of red wine and then Amy and the weasels retired to our stateroom around 8 pm. I stayed up, wrote all this down and then went on to blast space aliens through out most the night.
More to follow, end of line....