Ugh! A two-Walmart day!

(c) 2010 Lydia Hinshaw

ORMOND BEACH, FL -- When I'm living in a remote area, a place where it's hard to buy anything, and what I can buy is absurdly expensive, I dream of Walmart.
In four summers as a seasonal tourism worker, I've lived 70, 110, 125 and 66 miles from the nearest Walmart. In two of those summers, the nearest Walmart was across an international border, requiring customs and immigration checks in both directions. I made regular pilgrimages.
Back home, I rarely drive the four miles to Walmart. In the 18 months since we came home from Yosemite, I've probably been in the place three times. Smaller local stores are not much more expensive, and far more convenient.
But a dreaded Walmart expedition has been looming for several weeks, because Prince Charming and I needed to buy long-sleeved white dress shirts with button-down collars as part of our uniform for our summer jobs at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
We'd checked several other places and struck out, usually because of high prices. The Prince, who loves to shop, had already scouted out the shirts at our local Walmart and it had the kind of shirts we needed at a good price.
The trouble was, when the Prince visited several weeks ago, ordinary-sized people had already bought all the ordinary-sized shirts, and all that were left were sized for sumo wrestlers.
We leave in a couple of weeks, so it was time to try again. Saturday morning, the shelves had been restocked, and the Prince got lucky. He found three shirts in his size. But there was only one shirt small enough to fit me, and I need at least two in order to avoid wasting my summer in the employee laundry room.
It had come to this: I'd already spent an hour in one Walmart, and now I was going to have to visit another one. Sadly, that doesn't present much of a problem here.
We drove south 10 miles to a Walmart in Port Orange.
Happily, I found a stack of shirts in the right size, grabbed two of them and through the checkout line and back in the car in 15 minutes or less.
It feels good to be checking things off our list as we prepare for our trip.
And I'm starting to think about how I'll look forward to Walmart trips from the North Rim. The nearest Walmart is in St. George, UT, 130 miles away.