The Essentials

I hate shopping at Wal-Mart, for personal as well as moral reasons. But sometimes, when you're as frugal (read cheap) as I am, it can't be helped. Like when you're moving north, and you need a crap-load of toiletries and personal hygiene products.

We went in with fifty bucks. Our intention was to grab the necessities. I was thinking razors, aspirin, maybe a couple of bottles of shampoo. But as we walked up and down the aisles, we kept throwing more and more into our cart.

After doing the math aloud (with several people standing within earshot), Nicole announced that she would need four extra large boxes of tampons to get her through a year.

I bought three toothbrushes, three sticks of deodorant, two packs of floss, six tubes of toothpaste. The list goes on.

It's not that it's impossible to get any of this stuff in Tulita. We've just decided that it'll be easier to have piles of this stuff on hand so that we don't run out. There is a small store in Tulita, but it's more like a convenience store. You go there if you're out of bbq sauce on a Sunday afternoon, and you pay for it. Most people get their groceries flown in from Norman Wells. The plane comes once a week. It normally charges $2.55 per kilogram of cargo, but there is something called the Food Mail program that lowers that price to $0.80/kg.

And the price when it was all said and done?