Off to The Wal-Mart

Day one of Project Vacation started off with sleeping in late. How pathetic is it that 8:00am is considered sleeping in? In the days of my youth, I could sleep in until 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon. After two cups of coffee, Mom and I piled into the Saturn and it was off to The Sam's Club and The Wal-Mart. Are you going to drive? Mom kept asking. It didn't take more than three hints before I caught on that she wanted me to drive. Fortunately, I've visited enough times that I know my way around town pretty well.

Hard to believe, but it was my first ever time inside a Sam's Club. It's like a grocery store on steroids. Everything is super sized. You don't buy a jar of pickles, you buy a five gallon buckets of pickles. The jars of mayonnaise are so big they have wheels on them and you pull them like carry-on luggage around the store. The tuna cans were the size of missile silos. You put those three ingredients together and you could have made enough tuna salad to feed the entire state.

So anyway, that was just a quick stop to pick up what appeared to be a 1,000 pound bag of dog food. After the forklift brought it out to the Saturn, we walked across the same shopping center to The Wal-Mart. I'm not a fan of The Wal-Mart. Mom knows this and I swear she does this just to torment me and see if I'll cave into mass commercialization and give my money to the ultra-rich Walton family. Although I'll probably lose my lefty-liberal membership card for admitting this, I did have to avail myself of the cheap, cheap cost for a 12-pack of Coke Zero. I rationalize that it couldn't be a product made in China so I wasn't contributing to the export of jobs overseas.

Just inside the door, I deftly elude the 200 year old greeter and stumbled upon the in-store Premier Bank...

This is a sound policy to institute for a bank. Apparently you can bring the firearm into The Wal-Mart, you just can't take it all the way into the bank. I didn't see any rifles, handguns, or muskets on the gun rack outside the bank so I felt safe enough to use the ATM.


It was the once-a-month grocery excursion for Mom, so we did a lot of shopping at The Wal-Mart. Here's Mom looking for fabric softener.


This is Mom buying hot dogs for the dogs. No, you didn't read that wrong. Mom buys hot dogs to slice up and put in the dog's food once a week. You'd get bored too if you ate the same dog food everyday of your life, says Mom. She's got a point there. I give her a little grief because we didn't get them any tater salad to go along with the hot dogs. She laughs at my gentle ribbing, then proceeded to make potato salad for dinner that night just to make sure there will be left-overs for the dog's "hot dog day." Guess who got the last laugh on that one.... not just bob. One full shopping cart (and a 12-pack of Coke Zero) later, the shopping was done and it was back to the Saturn for the ride home. Guess who drove again? Yep... it was me.


There you have it.... our day at The Wal-Mart.