Today I finally ventured out of the valley on my own. We were told yesterday that our permanent housing will not be ready any time soon and we should, as a consequence, make a home of this temporary accommodations. All of our stuff is somewhere between CA and MD in a storage owned by the JK Moving company. Until we tell them where they can deliver our stuff we are to made do with the clothes we have and the temporary furniture and dishes provided by the park. Full disclosure: it’s kind of fun not to have your stuff and forcibly live in a minimalistic way.
All that said, today after we got the official communication, I decided to venture out in my electric car all the way down to a town called Merced. I was told that’s the first town that has both a target and a Costco in the same urban net. So there I went, hoping to get stuff to get us through November when our someday to be more permanent house is supposed to be ready for us. 
It took me a very long time to get there. There were some places in the road where working crews were removing rocks out of the asphalt strip. For what I hear, this is fairly common, and honestly looking at the hills around the road I am not surprised. Then there is the “for-ever-temporary-bridge” that made a former highway into a one way road for a couple of miles due to a landslide about 3 years ago. I have been told they gave up trying to fix the road and they will just keep it as it is and I better plan on an extra 10 to 20 minutes on route 140 whenever I use it.
The road runs right next to a beautiful yet scarily close and at the bottom of a cliff rocky river. The Merced river; one of those crystal clear rivers where trout thrive, really beautiful. you can’t go faster than 50 mph because of the winding nature of driving through mountains. Once you pass the town of Mariposa the road changes from high sierras with copper colors and bare slopes to a beautiful landscape of golden hay that extend all the way to the infinite. The view explains why California is known as the golden state. Forget about the actual gold, the beauty is in the waves of golden hay that form the central valley and shine under the sun. driving through them you feel like a dark insect exploring this forest of golden spears that ends where the wine farming starts.
most of my drive was off the grid. No phone signal of any kind not even satellite radio. All of a sudden there I was in 2018 completely alone. In the age of technology and social networks there I was completely alone in an ocean of beautiful golden spears of grass that sparkled for my enjoyment.
Merced was not a pretty sight, and the task of stocking up at Costco knowing that I had a 2 hours drive back home and that I don’t want to do this every week was not the highlight of my trip. For someone used to having grocery stores, clothing stores and pharmacies at the tip of my fingers, it was not easy to plan ahead. Now, hours later and looking at my load of groceries I can safely say… I did a terrible job. I didn’t even made it to Target. I never liked shopping and after an hour or so at Costco, no universal force would have been strong enough to take me to yet another store.
When I got home, tired and feeling I failed to properly stock up, I went outside the house with my glass of wine. I shared with other people at the playground how I felt and they said, while sipping their beers (yes you can drink in this playground) “don’t worry you’ll learn to stock up when you see how much work it’s to do that more than once a month. and by the way, get an extra freezer, it’s the only way” So cheers to frozen goods, huge boxes of crackers and restaurant size bags of rice! Welcome to your “no-groceries-nearby” life MV!!
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