June 10, 2010 – Out of Montana and Back to Work – Part I

For a country that prides itself on being the world’s smartest and most technologically advanced, America can be surprisingly backward. 85 octane at the pump is standard throughout the States — as is the engine knock that naturally accompanies such rotten gasoline.

And Americans everywhere still write cheques!

At grocery checkouts throughout the nation we waited patiently, nostalgically watching the customer in front of us carefully balance a cheque-book after purchasing a grocery cart full of Frito Lay product.

And the typical American’s world wide web savvy seems tenuous at best. One day, hungering for a cyber fix, we asked a knowledgeable looking group of young women where we might find an internet café. They stared at us blankly until one offered, “Starbuck’s in Cancun?”

Archview RV in Moab, Utah advertises “free WiFi”. I called ahead to book a site close to the internet hot spot. Every campground with web access has one of these spots, invariably located adjacent to the bathhouse.

One can then kill the proverbial two birds with one stone surfing and flushing concurrently. Archview’s router, like its misleading moniker, was a disappointment.

Five of us, including a young Israeli who looked like he was desperately awaiting further instruction from his Mossad superiors, spent an evening gamely but futilely pointing our lap-tops at the antenna sprouting from the laundry room.

We learned in the morning that the persistent wind — which has followed us from Texas like a hungry Mexican dog — had deflected the satellite dish from its intended target.

The on-site handywoman showed up with a spanner, banged the receiver back into place and all was right with the cyber world.

The camper van thing is a phase of early retirement we needed to experience. Hopefully we’ll be through this soon and on to a phase that offers a larger hallway experience. But we love it and have things down to a science.

Our cramped quarters — and refrigerator — dictate finely-tuned grocery shopping sprees: three days worth of meals and a hearty gewürztraminer (or three) all crammed tightly into one cubic foot of cool space.

Mind you with the weather we’ve experienced over the last months of travel, we could just as easily have left the hamburger and fresh fish up on the roof rack where the greatest threat was not spoilage but freezer burn.

Interestingly, while the low country cuisine of grits and pan-seared garlic served in the Carolinas was new and interesting to our palates and sampling Tex-Mex in the south-west US is certainly mandatory, our favorite meals have all been of our own humble making.

The flash frozen Ahi (yellow-fin tuna) we acquired at a small grocery in Nowhere, Utah turned out to be a highlight of our camp cuisine. Seared in butter and served blue rare, this piscatorial treat was better by far than our many saucy, sodium-soaked fancy restaurant meals.

The biggest groceteria surprise in the US is the quality of meats. Beef is expensive but the scrawny longhorns we saw feeding on sparse fields of Mormon Tea in Utah did not convert to mouth-watering Alberta ribeyes.

Chicken is cheap but often tastes like the poor thing was force-fed catfish pulp. The typical yellowish colour in the fat is attributed to a corn diet but is still disconcerting when viewed from above splayed out on a plate. So is the realization that all twelve packages of chicken thighs sitting in the meat counter weigh 1.42 lbs and cost precisely $3.16 (with value-saver coupon).

How do “they” accomplish this? Are the chicks all identical twins? Are they cloning chickens? I call foul.

Gerry & Florence