With small towns come small grocery stores. They have their benefits: super friendly staff, very close to home and gumball machines that still take only a penny, but the down side is small selection and exorbitant prices. Because of this, most country folk take trips into the city to buy things they can't locally and to save money by shopping at Sam's Club, Costco and Walmart. It's usually a big all-day or half-day trip and we usually stock up.
This post is a record of our first trip into the city - Great Falls, Montana.
It takes about 45 minutes to get there from my house, and my favorite part about the drive is passing Square Butte. It's a beautiful sight.
We also pass many beautiful barns (I still swear I am going to do a whole blog post with just pictures of cool barns).
When we pulled into the city and Brandon saw Scheels, he about had a tizzy fit. "I can buy Nike!" That's an exact quote. He's glad there's some part of city life in which he can participate.
First stop: Target to shop for school clothes.
Here is Lily looking at socks. She insisted on low cut ones this year.
Of course, McCann did his usual: playing on the clothes racks like they are monkey bars,...
hiding behind belts,...
and doing yoga under display carts.
Brandon did his usual too...
He wasn't the only one in that situation. This guy looked like he was about to die of boredom waiting for his better half.
Side note: should I buy these superhero undies for Brandon? Nah! Okay, on to the next store: Walmart for school supplies.
This shot was taken when we were totally lost trying to find Walmart. My wife hasn't lived in Montana for a couple of decades.
We finally found it. Wahoo! BUT, this is where all hell broke loose.
First problem: apparently, we weren't the only ones thinking about school supply shopping the Saturday before school. The place was a zoo. I had thought about buying supplies when we were in Utah, but decided to wait. I didn't want to haul it all the way up to Montana. I had second thoughts, when seeing this crowd. It might have been easier.
Second problem: Lily was about to die from starvation, so we made a stop at the Subway there in Walmart.
Third problem: McCann started complaining about his stomach, so we...
grabbed him some Pepto - a deviation from our shopping list.
Then we quickly went down the school list and got the heck out of there. We were going to stop at Sam's Club and stock up on food, but we said, "forget this!" and bought just the few things we needed at Walmart and...
Our first trip to the city was cut short (only a half-day). Here is a photo Fauneil took on our way home. A couple of things I learned: 1) I took the convenience of the city for granted when I lived there. It's so easy to pop over to a store grab what I need, any time, day or night. 2) In the city, we waste a lot of gas and time driving back and forth to the store. We should plan better and only go when necessary.
]
