The story of our weekends

©2012 Lydia Hinshaw 

Part of our long weekend. . .

. . .and the rest

 WEST GLACIER, MT -- Our jobs here are four days on, four days off, which sounds pretty good.  It's great that every weekend lasts four days.
 The flaw in the arrangement results from our living situation.  We have no refrigerator, and must keep perishable food in a 40-quart cooler.  And since we live in a van in bear country, and our campground has no bear boxes, all of our food must be stored inside our vehicle except when we're actually eating it.
 All the food in our possession commutes to work with us.  It goes on weekend trips.  It goes shopping.  It waits at the trailhead while we tramp through the wilderness.
 Given the limited space in the Magic Bus, you will not catch us stocking up at Costco.
 The two middle days of our weekends we can spend hiking, as the top picture from our Siyeh Pass shows, or sightseeing by car.  But the first and last days of each weekend must be spent, at least in part, in a supermarket, which unfortunately is the opposite direction from most of the weekend activities we'd like to plan.
 Prince Charming is the shopping expert, calculating how much food we need for a four-day work week, while pushing a cart through the Safeway in Whitefish.  Even more difficult is figuring out how much can be squeezed into the cooler, while still leaving enough room for enough ice to keep things from spoiling.
 Our work days are long, sometimes more than 11 hours of stressful driving sandwiched between boring waits in construction delays.  After work, we are too tired for 46-mile round trip grocery runs.   Some evenings we are too tired even to drag ourselves into the local diner on our way home.
 But we like things this way.  In previous jobs, we've lived in cramped indoor quarters and eaten in dreary employee dining rooms.  In those places, room and board was deducted from our paychecks.  This on-the-plantation sort of lifestyle is something we plan to avoid in the future, even it it means cooking over a campfire.
 We eat better, and most days we eat less.