~Thursday, October 21, 2021~
Day 494
A HAPPY BIRTHDAY and shout out to our kind, smart, witty, compassionate, handsome kiddo Shane as he turns the big 2️⃣5️⃣ today. Where did the time go? Seriously, it seems like yesterday that you were making homemade explosives, bike ramps, forts and menus for your family! Glad the homemade chemical experiments have been replaced with a real love of cooking/bbqing. Wish we could be together on his special day, but hugs and Facetime will have to do this year. We’ll be seeing eachother soon!
Per our usual arrival at a new place, a day of grocery shopping and gas filling was in order, mixed in with a few chores like cleaning the shower and defrosting the freezer. So I’m sorry there’s nothing too exciting to report. But we have made our list of what we’d like to see while in the Dorset area, and there’s a lot! So stay tuned. Did you know that Dorset is the home to America’s oldest marble quarry and the birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous? Who knew??!
Back to shopping…..man have food prices gone up or what? It will be really interesting to see how our food budget averages out, and may have to bump up to reality. It seems our weekly expense so far in that department is around $200 and that doesn’t include beer and tequila. I can’t vouch for the beer, but tequila is way more expensive on the East Coast than California’s prices. A bottle of the “cheap” stuff, Jose Cuervo, is around $35.00 to $40.00, where we were used to spending around $19.00 at Costco in California. Most of the Costcos we’ve been to in the past year, few and far between, do not sell spirits, only wine and beer. I know, I know...most of you are probably asking why we don’t bump up our tequila choice but it just kills me to spend Patron prices when I’m making a margarita. So maybe I’ll just have to wait for a birthday or Christmas occasion to brighten my style of margarita making. And then there’s the gas. Hank takes diesel, so we’re seeing average prices as of late hovering around $3.50/gallon (I think California is about a dollar more right now). Early on in the trip, we were spending $2.50/gallon. And we’ve got about 3,000 miles of driving ahead of us to get back to California for the Holidays. 😝💰
While Jeff made his fabulous Puff Pastry Tomato Bisque Soup, I was outside in the dark with a headlamp on, finishing up detailing the outside of the truck. Really can’t get around the unpredictable weather but so far rain is in the forecast for the middle of the night. The outside of the truck looks beautiful (from what I can see), and the soup….amazing!