The Countdown to Departure

We’re days, rather than weeks, from departure now. For the past two days we’ve had a rental car and have been running around gathering up every item that’s on each of our spreadsheets (mine=five pages, single spaced, not including fresh food…).

If you’ve been reading a few cruising blogs you’ll no doubt have heard people talk about their spreadsheets: About how they inventoried their boats, catalogued what they had, made lists of what they eat and how quickly they eat it, cross-referenced this stuff with other peoples spreadsheets as well as notes about what is and isn’t available in French Polynesia (and at what price), then double checked it all with a dietician (kidding) before creating the perfect personalized spreadsheet…

 I didn’t do this. I’m sort of embarrassed to say our spreadsheets are my friend Behan’s spreadsheets (S/V Totem). All I did was go through her lists (including skimming her recent blog posts about what they had too much/ too little of…) and reduced all the numbers (they have 3 kids and left with crew)—then went for it. We’ll eat what they ate.

On the first day alone I filled five jumbo shopping carts with food. That’s a lot of food. And fortunately I was shopping alone—because it filled the trunk, the back seat and the front seat to capacity.

For the most part provisioning in Mexico is straightforward. There are loads of excellent cheap options and we should have plenty of variety. The problem comes when you start to get into specifics—if you want a certain type of cheese, crackers, canned veggies or sauce (even one you’ve bought a hundred times before) it may not be available today, or this week, or ever again.

Mexico grocery stores are at best unpredictable.

and don't worry--we have way more than two bottles of wine...

 The other issue is language. My Spanish is serviceable, and I can typically get by. But when it comes to shopping, you sort of need to know what things are called--precisely. Hand waving doesn’t work when you want baking powder or are looking for a specific medication… And if you want to avoid certain ingredients, you need to understand how to read the words. All of which can make grocery shopping last longer than expected and can still result in a few unexpected purchases. Who would have thunk that you could even buy reduced calorie sugar with extra fibre…

The good news is our spread sheets are almost completely checked off. The bad news is somehow we need to store all this stuff away. I think the shopping was the easy part...