Into the Rat's Nest

I was having a nice life-maintenance day in Perth's trendy suburb of Fremantle when I came to the realization, even while sitting in a lovely café, that I’m ready to move on from Perth and the West Coast. It’s time to get this journey moving on its counter-clockwise push. But first, I had an essential day-trip to take.

The quokka has been dubbed the “happiest animal in the world” by Buzzfeed, who, hyperbole aside, knows its adorable critters. The only place in the world where quokkas live is Rottnest Island, a short ferry-hop from the Fremantle pier. In fact, “Rottnest” is Dutch for “Rat’s Nest,” because they mistook the little buggers for giant rats.

I was apprehensive on the ferry ride over. The wildlife experiences I looked forward to in Shark Bay turned out to be awfully touristy, and the ferry crowd threatened more of the same. As soon as we landed, I unloaded my trusty cheapo hybrid and took off for the island’s uninhabited West End, hoping to get away from the settlements and the crowds. But I wasn’t sure about my chances. Would I even spot a single one of these small, modest, nocturnal animals?

Not 500 yards from the pier, I saw my first quokka, right by the side of the road. 

Hi!

About 10 minutes later, there was another, skittering into the bushes. Then, I spotted one taking some shade under a roadside picnic bench. I parked my bike on the road, keeping my distance so as not to spook it. Then, this happened.

eeeeee!

eeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

EEEEEEE!!!

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!

  

“Inquisitive little fellars, aren’t they?” Another visitor remarked while his wife took photos of them crowding around her feet. ("There are heaps of them!" she shouted.) I don’t know how inquisitive they are, or, honestly, how bright. I think people feed them. And I don’t care. I touched one. I TOUCHED ONE. 

Unfortunately, they don't have the permanent "happy face" Buzzfeed sells you. They have your typical, albeit sweet, marsupial face. And they do have really ratty tails. But their stupid little ears and absolutely snuggly demeanor more than make up for it.

Rottnest has just one tiny settlement near its pier, and then nothing but windswept heath and sheltered coves for swimming, snorkeling, and fishing. I took a leisurely route home, stopping on deserted beach after deserted beach. 

 The summer heat has finally broken, and it was cloudy and too chilly for swimming, so I would either walk on the sand or just wade out. Standing knee-deep on an utterly deserted beach, I was startled by an American accented voice behind me, saying, “If you’re going in that far, you might as well just jump in!”

It was a nice young Canadian guy I’d noticed making a similarly speedy bike loop around the island. His name was Andrew, and he’d been living in Australia for a year, alternately working in the gold mines and traveling. We hit it off right away, and continued on our bike tour together, catching lunch at the one pub in town. While we were eating on the patio (having a conversation about what animals we would take on in a cage match--he wanted to fight an ostrich, and I'd take on a panda any day of the week), a quokka came up and started begging chips from the patrons right on the deck. So I was right about them being fed. Meanwhile, the sun had come out, and the day had warmed up enough for us to get in a quick swim before catching the ferry ride home.

It was an excellent last day in Perth. I've since traveled around the "corner" of Western Australia to head east, across the vast coast of the Southern Ocean. I have a lot of updates and photos to share, but it's mostly been camping, so I've been without internet. Look for more updates soon!
 

First Road Trip

I finally put the vehicle to good use, and made a 4-day trip up the West Coast to Shark Bay.

I'm thinking of naming it "Princess."

Shark bay was a major motivator for this trip. It's got abundant wildlife, beautiful scenery, and the few living examples of stromatolites, the very earliest life-forms on earth. Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed overall.

I expected to drive long distances to get places in Australia; the guidebooks give you ample warning, and the scale is easy to grasp when you realize that the country is about the size of the continental United States. What I didn’t expect was that when I got to a place, everything in that place would still be ridiculously far apart. Shark bay is nearly 200 km long. With a 100km/hr speed limit, that means two hours from top to bottom. With one major tourist site on the south end, and the other all the way at the north, and the only fuel and food about halfway in between, not to mention well-spaced campsites, you can easily eat up three or four hours a day just getting from place to place. And the scenery in between stops isn’t much to look at. 

The only time the view changes is when new bugs hit the windshield.

The moment I ever stepped out of the vehicle for a roadhouse break, I was immediately assaulted by two things: the overwhelming heat, and truly maddening swarms of flies. The flies here are legendary, and as unavoidable as the weather. There are so many surrounding you at once that the buzz swells into an overwhelming chord. The locals don't even bother waving them away anymore, though they'll take a chomp if you let them settle on you for long. Also, the sun was brutal, especially for my February-pale skin. It takes me almost as long to prepare to go out in the sun here as it does to prepare to go out in the blowing snow on the ski slopes of Vermont.

I did get lucky with my campsites. They were right on the coast, and buffeted by constant, powerful winds. While the wind made camping a bit difficult (and was so strong that it made my photos come out blurry), it was preferable to heat and flies. The permits were one night only, but when I requested another for a second night, the woman at the office waved it off and said, “Well, I’m not supposed to…”

The first night, I was on a small, isolated cove.

The second was an unbelievable wide-open beach, with a long lagoon behind a high sandbar made of billions of tiny white shells. I waded in the warm lagoon (careful to keep my toe-shoes on, as the guidebooks warn of poisonous stonefish), accompanied by sting rays and some kind of shark or skate with salmon-pink fins. When I went to explore a shady area of green shrubbery, I startled a big red kangaroo, who bounded away. There were several hopping about, especially early in the morning.

Spot Princess at the center, far off. The beach was about a mile long, and deserted.

You can kinda see the sharks here. The water was crystal-clear.

Wobbly sunset over the Indian Ocean

 That's the good part. The bad parts involved getting there, getting food, getting fuel, and seeing the stromatolites. Stromatolites are intellectually interesting, but really, they look like blobs of crap.

Thanks for oxygenating the atmosphere, blobs of crap!

The bay where they live is a hellhole of searing heat, with blizzards of flies. I got out of the van, walked down the boardwalk, took a photo (blurry in my frantic fly-waving), and got right back in my car and left.

Another okay part was Shell Beach, which is just what it sounds like: a beach made entirely of tiny white shells. While it wasn't swarmed with flies, it was nonetheless deserted, and not particularly welcoming. It turned out that the beach at my second campsite was also all shells. Nowhere did they ever tell you where all of these frikking shells come from, which seems like the obvious question.

All shells. No sand.

The other disappointment was Monkey Mia, the resort at the tip of Shark Bay, which was supposed to be a wildlife mecca. When I arrived, I was dismayed that it really was just a resort, rather than a national park or nature reserve. There were cabins and shoddy restaurants and tourist posters everywhere, all accompanied by more choking heat and infuriating flies. The only entertaining thing about the place was that they have pest emus.

doi.

Do you know why they call it Monkey Mia? Oh. Me neither.

So after a quick lunch, I high-tailed it back to my nice campsites. So Shark Bay amounted to hours and hours of driving, followed by two nice campsites, and that was it.

My other major disappointment was that I had yet to swim in the wonderfully warm Indian Ocean. Most of the waters in Shark Bay are so dramatically shallow that you can wade out until you get bored and still not reach bathtub depth. The water also supports miles of sea-grass beds, which are excellent for sea life but kind of squicky to swim in. The one really beautiful aquamarine ocean, at Monkey Mia, is a protected “Dolphin experience” area where you’re not supposed to go in over your knees.

Right now, I'm back south in Fremantle, Perth's cool coastal suburb, and I'm happy to say I solved my final problem. Even though South Beach in Fremantle is considered "Not worth a special trip" by local internet reviewers, it is by far the best beach I've ever been to. Today I spent a few hours happily bobbing in its calm, crystal-clear, aquamarine, cool-shower-temperature waters. Heaven.

Second Impressions of Australia:

• A lot of people swim in hats. Considering that the average Australian looks like an Irish person who's been squinting for his entire life, they justifiably take the sun seriously.
• They really know their refreshing beverages: anything with lemon, lime, or ginger is top-notch. They can’t seem to fathom iced coffee, though. The only iced-coffee beverages I’ve found were actually more like coffee-flavored milk—whole milk. And lord knows, when you’re hot and parched, there’s nothing you want more than a half-litre of thick, creamy, sweet whole milk!  
• Speaking of coffee: The coffee in Australia is universally excellent. It isn’t surprising that you can get really good coffee here—you can find really good coffee in any Western country. What’s surprising is that you can’t get bad coffee here. There simply is no diner dishwater, no scorched 7-11 swill, no Dunkin’. You can walk into the most unlikely tourist restaurant in the most depopulated resort town and receive a coffee that’s as fresh and expertly prepared as the snootiest barista-haven in Cambridge. Honestly, though, I’d accept a small drop in quality for a bit of an increase in quantity; the roadhouses are often bereft.
• They’ve opted out of the highway-driving-as-blood-sport. Australians on the freeway are like,
  “I enjoy going the speed limit!”
  “You don’t say—I enjoy going the speed limit, too!”
  “How about we each take our own lane, and we’ll go the speed limit together!”
  “Hooray!”
• Australians are extraordinarily friendly. This is different from “polite” or “professional.” They assume an easy, dirty-language familiarity right away. Introducing the “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” sign would devastate the Australian economy.  
• The aesthetic here is very healthy, very blonde, very mainstream, for lack of a better word. I went outside one evening with my glasses on and realized I was the only person wearing dark-rimmed hipster frames. Over tea, I chatted with the Perth AirBnB owner about a recent New York Times article declaring Perth the latest “hipster” capital, mostly due to its bar scene and locavore restaurants. “It said we’re the new Brooklyn. Is that true?” he asked. Well, I had to inform him, you'd never see people in Perth riding those old-timey bicycles with the big giant front wheel and the little tiny back wheel, so no. It isn't a "hipster" town in the way I'm used to thinking of. There’s very little of an “alternative” or  “ironic” culture here. That’s somewhat uncomfortable for me, because for most of my life I've aimed for an edgy or counter-mainstream aesthetic, so I feel like I stand out a bit.  It’s also a relief, because everything is sincere and straight-up, with no undercurrent of sarcasm or arch self-awareness. 
• The crows here look just like American crows, but they sound just like "the goat that yells like a man."
• People here lock up their bikes with cable locks. And they lock just the frame. What. Boston, you know what I'm talking about.

Opposite Land!

Hello from Australia! I'm in my lovely room in Perth via AirBnB. It's about 100 degrees out, and I've just retreated from the blazing antipodean sun for the afternoon.

Not Very Opposite-y
Bill Bryson observed that it was happily disconcerting to fly all the way around the world, only to end up in a place that feels profoundly familiar, and he's right. The only way you can tell Perth isn't an especially nice part of San Diego is that there are no Mexicans. (I don't mean to be flip: a fish taco and a frozen margarita would compliment this place most excellently.) The sun is crisp, the streets are wide, the cars are new and clean, and everyone is relaxed and tanned. The only way I stand out is having skin the color of boiled Irish cabbage.

So far, most of my time has been taken up with errands. I picked up my advertisement-festooned campervan and drove its giant, roaring bulk across town (staying dutifully on the left), and then promptly went out and bought a cheap hybrid bicycle that suits the small city much better. I haven't seen much of the country yet, and sadly, no pictures. This evening, I plan to step out for my first bit of recreation, and I'll bring my camera. But:

First Impressions

• You know how old ladies dress in cartoons? Starchy floral dresses, cardigans, knee socks, and orthopedic shoes? American old ladies wear, like, track suits. But Australian old ladies dress like "Old Ladies." It's comforting.
• The women here wear really excellent shoes. I was under the impression that people lived in flip-flops, but I'mma have to step up my footwear game.
• My guesthouse is near Perth's Chinatown, but it's the most clean, organized Chinatown I've ever been in. I saw a guy pushing what looked like a bagger lawnmower along the sidewalk. It was a vacuum cleaner. Carol Follett would be proud.
• A lot of people drive these sweet El Camino looking things and I totally want one.

Despite looking and feeling like SoCal, there's a strong pedestrian presence in the city's downtown. I spent nearly an hour getting hopelessly lost in a maze of plazas and malls looking for the stupid cell-phone store, and it was a constant crowd. Unfortunately, most of the walking areas are shopping malls, so despite the good people-watching, the cultural offerings are a bit bland.

Everything is very functional. Whenever I've needed something, the people who helped me were friendly and knowledgeable. In fact, the only problems I've had with my arrival have come from 1. Fucking Verizon and 2. Fucking Bank of America.

Even though it's summertime, Australia is so much closer to the equator than the US that the sun sets relatively early--7:30ish. 

Because so many of the trees are varieties of eucalyptus, the whole place smells as though it's been gently deodorized. 

I've seen only a couple of things that are unmistakably Australian: a few rainbow lorikeets,

This doesn't seem like the kind of thing you should be able to see on a city bike path.

• and the occasional Aboriginal Australian. I'd heard that Aborigines were often pretty down-and-out, and while they do make up a decent part of the homeless population, most of the native people I've seen have dressed and appeared just like other Australians, which is nice.

But how was your flight!?!
Long. Emirates is pretty swanky; the food was universally tasty, and the selection of movies, music, and info on the seat-screens was great. (I enjoyed dozing off to the soothing image of clouds passing underneath us via a live camera feed from beneath the aircraft.) However, the best part of the flight was something the airline had no control over: on one of my longest nighttime legs, I had an entire 3-seat row all to myself, so I could lie across the seats and sleep.

The Equivalent Australian Opposite of "G'Day!"

Tomorrow is launch day! I'll be in a netherworld of jet lag and time-zone differences from Tuesday until Thursday evening, local time. Since several people have asked for a map, here's the outline I put up a few months back:


View Larger Map 

Click the link under "view larger map" to see what the lettered points are. My main plan hasn't changed much since I made this. In fact, the only official reservations I've made are the flight in and out and a 4-day acclimation stay in Perth.

Today, my main errand is to drop off Sindri at the boarder's. I like to imagine that when my cat is "going to the boarder's," he's really going to a chain bookstore where nerds will let him sit on their laps while they read comics, and where maybe someone will sneak him a slug of whipped cream now and then from the on-site Starbucks.

See you when it's summer!

Let's Not Get Crazy

Now that I'm just one month out, I'm starting to gather all my stuff and think about how to pack. I still have all my super-sophisticated backpacking gear from previous travels, and it's way more fun than it should be to spread everything out on the floor and decide what I'll need and what I won't.

However, my hyper-preparedness for my last trip has made me paranoid. Because I have so much wilderness gear, it's tempting to pack as though I'm going to blast into the outback by myself for two months straight.

I keep having to remind myself: Australia is a civilized country! They sell food there! They have giant camping stores! One of their nationwide banks has a deal with my nationwide bank so I won't even pay ATM fees!

Seriously. This is a driving trek, not a hiking trek; at most, I plan to spend 5 or 6 (non-consecutive) nights out of two months camping away from my vehicle.

Also, summer clothing is much, much smaller than winter clothing. I'm happily realizing that I'll need to carry fewer bags than I planned. I just have to make sure there's room to bring home koalas wine.

Damn, Nature, You Scary

Australia is home to deadly, deadly things. The deadliest snakes, spiders, reptiles, fish, birds, and probably fluffy bunny rabbits live here. Here's a quick survey of the things I'm afraid of in Australia, on a fear scale from 1 to 10.

1: Snakes. Yes, Australia has the deadliest snakes in the world, including sea snakes, but on the whole, I don't think of snakes as that dangerous. I've never been bitten by a snake. Nor has anyone I know. I kind of like snakes, and from all experience, they tend to be sedate or even timid if you leave them alone. So while snake venom may be terrible, you have to get it in your bloodstream for bad things to happen, and that seems unlikely. 

2: Spiders. There are tons of venomous spiders in Australia, including one that focuses itself in and around Sydney. I kind of feel the same way about spiders as I do about snakes: in opposition to the popular opinion, I have a certain affection for them. Unlike snakes, though, I can certainly see how someone could overlook a spider and accidentally get bitten.

The redback, clearly a relative of the US black widow. I lived with black widows in Tucson without a problem.

2.5: Drop Bears. Google that stuff. 

2.5 Cassowaries. Like other big, dangerous animals, encounters with these guys are rare, but the cassowary is reported to be aggressive and potentially dangerous if it feels threatened. Like other big, dangerous, animals, I'd love to see one. But from a distance. Those things are dinosaurs.

3.5–4: Sharks. I plan on being in the water a lot, but sharks are rare, and shark attacks are rarer, and many beaches in Australia are patrolled.

 5: Crocodiles. This is where things turn from "Not really something I'm going to bother thinking about," to "Yeah, no." Saltwater crocodiles are big, charismatic, and fascinating. I'd love to see one, but in a controlled environment, like a croc farm. They're one of the few animals that routinely stalk and kill humans, and they do it much more often (and much better) than other maneaters. Guidebooks note that when camping in croc territory, it's best not to fetch water from the same spot more than once. Which is extra scary, because it means they're watching you.
 

Keeping the food chain in order.

6.5: Reef Residents: Stonefish, Blue-Ringed Octopus. You can see why people get stung by picking up the delicate, lovely blue-ringed octopus. Don't you just want to make a necklace out of it?

A necklace made of death within minutes.

 8–10: Jellyfish. Brainless, floating shopping bags with tentacles that sting you just by touching you. You can even get stung if you brush against stray shreds of tentacles that aren't attached to the animal anymore. Some, like the box jellyfish, are deadly. Others will just make you wish for death, what with the crippling, full-body pain for up to a week. The problem with jellyfish is that they have no real behavior to speak of. You can't avoid them by being conscientious or out-thinking them or even avoiding their specific homes. They just float there, in the middle of open water, all like "DUHHHH," and if it floats near you, you're dead.

All About Planning

So, Australia is a long way away. And it's big--about the size of the continental United States. This is useful to keep in mind when I'm planning. It's as though I'm working on a vacation that sees all the best of the US, from San Francisco to the Grand Canyon to New Orleans to Disneyworld to New York to the tip of Acadia to Chicago to Yellowstone. It's an overwhelming amount of information, and sorting it is a daunting task.

The lucky bit is that because I'm renting a campervan (view its charming tutorials--complete with Aussie automotive slang!--here), the majority of my lodging is taken care of. I'm actually not allowed to import a single scrap of food into the country, so no planning there, either. I can't even use my remaining 30 or so dehydrated meals, which are STILL IN MY FREEZER. Basically, my only planning involves making a long list of must-sees, and hanging a loose schedule on them.

So far, they consist of:

• Shark Bay: North of Perth, in the center of the coast of Western Australia, Shark Bay is a world heritage preserve that contains dugong (manatee) habitat, sharks, the world's only remaining stromatolites (the oldest and most primitive life forms known), and a pod of dolphins that have taken to chilling with human tourists. 
• The Great Australian Bight: Running along the south coast, it's like the Cliffs of Dover, if the Cliffs of Dover went for seven hundred miles. This coast abuts the Nullarbor Plain, an astonishingly flat, treeless expanse of the outback, so the contrast between it and the wave-swept Southern Ocean is incredible. The Bight also includes the Twelve Apostles, an oft-photographed series of dramatic sea stacks. 
• Kangaroo Island: Off the coast near Adelaide, it's a rural wildlife oasis that is remarkably unspoiled by introduced species (such as invasive plants or placental mammals, like rabbits and cats).
• Melbourne: Reports say it's the Portland or San Francisco of Australia; good cafes, hip culture, vital markets, trendy bars. Keep in mind that, like most Australian cities, its population tops out at about the same as Boston's, which I find to be a comfortable human scale.
• The Sights of Sydney: The opera house, the bridge (which you can climb on top of--at night!--with a guided tour), the royal botanical gardens, the beach, etc.
• The Great Barrier Reef: As mentioned in a previous post, the reef (and its depressing prognosis) is a big reason for taking this trip now. There are several islands where you can actually camp within the reef itself, with snorkeling opportunities right outside your tent flap.
  The GBR presents a challenge to planning. I thought about getting a dive certification before I went, but honestly, the idea of SCUBA diving doesn't appeal to me all that much, and the idea of spending nearly $1,000 bucks and many hours getting a certification I may never use again appeals to me even less. Of course, I want to see as much as I can, and the whole "oxygen" thing limits me, but in the end, I decided to go the free-swimming route.
  The other planning challenge is that campsites understandably fill up quickly. I should probably make a reservation as soon as I can. On the other hand, I really have no idea how my schedule will go once I'm in-country, and I hate to give myself a firm deadline for a destination that's so far into the itinerary. Since this is a pretty big must-see, though, I bet I'll bite the bullet and book a site ahead of time. Or maybe book several at different times, and cancel the ones I don't use. 
• The Katherine Gorge: A stop in one of my few true excursions away from the coast and into the outback. It's supposed to be a spectacular canyon, and IT'S MY NAME, DAMNIT. 
• Kakadu National Park: Right next to the Kate Gorge, it's a distillation of the swampy, wild north coast.

There are other must-sees that aren't plugged into the schedule yet, mostly because there are several opportunities, and I'll decide which to take once I'm there:

• Take a Surfing Lesson
• Visit a Vineyard/Tasting
• Have a Cold, Shitty Beer in a Roadhouse
• Eat a Kangaroo
• Eat an Emu 
• Snuggle a Koala
• See Some Parrots/Cockatoos
• Visit a Croc Farm
• Have Baby, Feed to Dingo (check accelerated gestation)
• Set Foot in the Indian and Southern Oceans

Right now, I have an outline that hits all of these in one way or another, all within the 8 weeks between my flight in and flight out. It's a packed schedule, and as with my trip out west, I'm open to the idea of throwing it away if the fancy strikes. The result is that despite all I want to see, I feel like things are seriously up in the air, especially considering I'm leaving in a bit more than three months!

Tickets. No, really.

Okay, phew! The skeevy discount-airfare web site did, in fact, refund 100% of my money. Today, I went to a REAL AIRLINE'S website and did a bang-up job of getting a ticket to Perth, Western Australia. This time, the price was actually below the best price I'd hoped for. So it worked out great in the end.

The dates weren't as ideal, plus I fly through Dubai, and Dubai wigs me out in a how-did-we-not-see-that-this-is-the-End-Times kind of way.

No one lives here. Nothing but the invisible desert wind howling through the empty glass towers.

I still found flights with manageable layovers, though. I'm flying out on February 25, and landing in Logan again on April 22, losing a day on the way out and gaining a day on the way back.

So: February 25, 2014. Heading to Oz.

Okay, whuuut...

So scratch that.

After booking the tickets through kayak.com, I woke up in the middle of the night last night to a notification on my phone. Apparently, Kayak booked the tickets through yet another discount-airfare site, airfare.com. Airfare.com called me and left a voicemail (at midnight!), saying the cost of my ticket had gone up "tremendously" at the "last minute," and recommending that I call or go online and cancel the tickets, unless I wanted to "pay... [ominous pause] more." They didn't even leave a phone number.

This sounds very un-legit. I poked around online and found a string of freaked-out, one-star reviews of airfare.com, rife with words like "scam," "avoid at all costs," and "kayak.com should have dropped these people long ago."

This morning, I called airfare.com's customer service. It turned out that the "tremendous" price raise was about $100.00, which on a flight to Australia is actually pretty insignificant. But I was skeeved, and I had a recording of them saying they would cancel my reservation with no penalty, so I thought it best if I just got out. I cancelled the flight, and the guy on the phone said he would honor the no-fee promise. I'll have to wait and see what the credit-card statement looks like when it comes back in the next few days. I hope to God this isn't some drawn-out battle with incompetent/malicious customer service.

Anyway. All in all, it shouldn't be a huge loss. It's on my credit card, so I can dispute the charges through my own bank as well, and the price of airfare is still the same, if not a little lower, than it was yesterday when I booked. I kind of want to wait for the refund to show up before purchasing other tickets, but either way, I'll look very closely at who's doing the booking next time.

Tickets!

My Australia plans have lagged, and it's no mystery: new(ish) job, new apartment, new town. It's tough to think about getting on a plane for two days and exploring an unfamiliar continent when you still can't find your way to from your own bedroom your bathroom with the lights off.

But I knew that plus-or-minus six months out was a good time to get the best price on plane tickets. Today, after several days of careful comparison shopping, the price on trans-Pacific flights dropped to my reasonable benchmark, and I leapt.

I'll be leaving the U.S. of A on February 26 and returning (or at least arriving) on April 24. I'm proud that I found a series of flights from Boston to Perth that connects one right after the other, getting me to Oz in record time (I'll see how my back feels about nearly 30 hours of nothing but sitting down after I get there.) Coming back, I end up with about a day's layover in LA, but it's long enough to actually give me time to get a hotel and sleep.

Now, to lay the rest of the major pieces in place: I have to reserve the camper van, and make sure I have a hotel to land in in Perth so I can skip a few days while my internal clock realigns. I might even get a vacation rental/apartment style spot so I can do serious gearing up and grocery shopping from a home base with a fridge.

This trip will creep up on me faster than the last one, I predict. Gotta make sure I stay focused!