THE TRIP TO MILES CITY
Friday, April 10, 2020
©2020 by Shawn Jipp
This is the day we go into Miles City to get food. Because of anticipation and excitement, I only got about four to five hours sleep. We are cautiously optimistic things will go well as for some reason Pat’s credit card has been declined for a smaller monthly reoccurring bill. Will Walmart have the food there? We see no charge from Walmart yet. Pat can’t get thru the phone to her credit card company. And so we launch from the house in her new Chevy Suburban Z71 edition.
As we drove and get closer to the freeway, I pick up a cellular signal while miles away. I use the hotspot on my iPhone to provide a wifi spot for my iPad. I get on the Walmart website. It unfortunately defaults to my account. After several minutes of attempts, I get logged on with Pat’s credentials. The Walmart website says there are no recent orders and there only four items in the shopping cart. Hmmm. This does not sound good. We continue driving towards Miles City. I called Walmart and asked for the grocery pickup. The kid that answered sounded like he was still in high school. I gave him Pat’s name which the order was under since she had paid for it. He told us where the pickup spaces where on the right side of the building and told us to call a direct number when we were close. By this time we were pulling into the Walmart parking lot and I told him so. He said he would be out in a few minutes.
We backed into one of the spaces, we donned our N95 masks, put on our gloves and I turned the airflow to outside to near maximum. A few minutes later he came out of the store with carts of food and over to Pat’s door. Pat pushed the button that remotely opens the rear hatch door. Pat cracked the window about ½ inch so we could hear him better. The top of the window was much taller than this teenager. He had to mention to us the substitutions they made due to items not being available. I guess they must have continued to sell grocery items to customers coming into the store since we had placed our order the day before. Luckily, there were few substitutions in our grocery order. One was the two loaves of Montana Wheat (popular brand here in Montana) 7 grain bread. They had not bothered replacing this with any type of bread at all! Oh well, they did get Robyn’s one loaf of rye bread. This will have to be our only bread for weeks. Pat asked the employee to sign for her to which he readily agreed. She then asked him if he could put the perishables into the large empty plastic cooler she had left in the rear. The Suburban has three rows of seats and the furthest back had already been folded and stowed. Just then her bank returned her call and so I watched the employee load the RV. The young employee commented “Things are getting crazy, they are installing plexiglass partitions inside the store.” I told him things are going to get worse. Then he commented that most drive-up orders are not this large. I couldn’t think of a reply so did not give one. I was thinking in regular times we would need to tip him but could quickly think of no way to do that safely. In retrospect, we could have rolled down window a ½ inch or so and pushed some bills through it. Next time.
We drove back home while I took pictures as we drove thru town. Little traffic. Only saw one person walking and no one had masks including a lady walking into Walmart. The Walmart employee did not even have gloves on.
As we drove home to our secluded country location, I text Robyn to let her know we were returning and gave her a list of the fast food restaurants I had seen in the little town of Miles City. I saw Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonalds, KFC/A&W, and Pizza Hut. I also saw Walmart, the fire department and ambulance service, two veterinary clinics, a closed little movie theater that had been playing Call Of The Wild (we have not seen that movie yet), an old downtown hotel called the Olive Hotel, the town water tower, a park, an US Bank branch, a very small casino (they are apparently legal in Montana), a museum, a tuxedo and bridal store, a flower shop, a gun store, a marketing company, two gas stations (unleaded gas was $1.89 at both stations), a true ‘Bad Boys’ facility (a jail for boys under 18 years old), a large mural of Miles City with the GPS coordinates and pictures of bucking horses and cattle and a cowboy, the sanitation company (looked really clean), the livestock commission, and the Fort Keogh Livestock and Range Research Laboratory. The freight train tracks run just outside the city and we drove under the tracks just as a train was rolling across above us.
When we got home we had to decide how to clean the goods. It was going to be below freezing that night so what we though safe to leave in the car we would leave for 48 hours, the rest we brought in especially the perishables such as meat, cheese, salad greens, cole slaw, apples, spinach, eggs, and bananas. The canned goods and soda we put into two large bins/plastic containers, the third had rye bread, crackers, apples, etc. The vegetable and fruit produce were mostly organic. The cheese was from Tilamook in Oregon. We went cheap in the eggs as they were not the nearly double priced free range eggs.
I looked up how to adequately kill the COVID-19 virus on groceries. We made a 10:1 solution of water and bleach and sprayed it on entire packages and cans that we wanted to use immediately such as Robyn’s gummy bears and Vinegar and Salt potato chips bags. Some items could have their cardboard boxes opened such as my Splenda packets and then we dumped the individual packets into a ziplock bag. We (two person operation) also carefully cut open the outside containers of the meat and cheese (no need to disinfect the outside of these types as we were wearing gloves and would throw them away) and put the contents into ziplock bags. The bleach solution must stay on containers for at least 10 minutes to make sure virus is killed. This is the same procedure the CDC uses for any unknown pathogen. It is also used when dealing with the very contagious canine Parvo virus. The rest of the items we would leave for 72 hours whether in the Suburban or in these three large plastic bins.
