The sealift ship arrived Tuesday last. The Umiavut, owned by Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping, arrived around 2:00 pm and the first of the sealift hit the shore around 4:00 pm.
I had wanted to get some photos of the hustle and bustle of the unloading, and the crates piled up at the shore, however I was busy with other things, and only had time to stop by occasionally and check to see if our crates had been unloaded. By late evening Leah took over looking for our crates. Finally around 12:30 she appeared with the news that our crates had finally been unloaded.
Four of the crates contained our sealift groceries for the year, including our pop. Now, if you’ve lived up here you know that pop is like gold. Actually it is worth about its weight in gold. We pay $2.00 at the stores for a can of pop, that is until their sealift pop runs out, after that it is at least $4.00 a can for the stuff they fly in. There is a small group of youth who 1) assumes there is pop in sealift crates, and 2) have perfected the art of stealthily prying away a corner for a crate and stealing pop from them. So not wanting to lose any of our groceries we got a baby sitter for Travis and began unloading our crates.
The cheapest way of getting your groceries home is to do it yourself, rather than hiring the local heavy equipment operator to deliver them from the shore to your home. So, one at a time, we opened a crate, emptied the contents into the truck
and transported them home, where we stacked them in our porch
and started the process anew. Some of the bulkier items, like toilet paper, and other we took over to the B&B. We’ll have to move them around a bit or work around them but there is no room here in the duplex.
We finished up at 4:00 am, and as it turns out we needn’t have worried about our pop going missing, as THEY NEVER SENT IT! That and our kleenex. Both of which will end up as higher priced items getting them here. We’re working on straightening everything up now. Our frozen items didn’t arrive on this ship as apparently they no longer have freezers on board, so they should be arriving on the next sealift, perhaps tomorrow.
Order a years worth of dry goods has become to be less stressful than the first time, although this year was more of a challenge, with the B&B and all. In all we spent about $7500 on this years groceries, not including sea freight, which is some $300 a revenue tonne.
Not your average trip to the grocers.
Comments
5 responses
Of all the things about that post that are so very different from our trip to the grocers, what I am thrilled to read is the one similarity, that you call pop “pop”. My wife has long made fun of the fact that everyone in North Carolina calls soda “pop”. According to her, who is a transplant from only a few hundred miles away, everyone else in the world calls it soda. So thanks, I now know that pop is pop in at least one other part of the world.
It must be a challenge to buy groceries for a year. It seems I am always going to the store to pick up something I forgot. That too must change as the gas prices go up and up here in Southern Ontario. (Mayberry, if you read here again, who calls pop “soda”? I’ve not heard pop called soda in my travels.)
–Many people in southern VA and NC call soda “pop”, but most everyone else I have met calls it “soda”. My wife is from Richmond Virginia and had never heard the term “pop” until she moved to NC. If I say pop in that area, people ask me what I am talking about, especially kids. During college I caught a lot of slack for saying “pop” and I was only ninety miles to the north in Blacksburg, Virginia. As far as American television goes, I’m pretty sure it is universally called soda, that is why I found it so interesting that it is pop in Canada. I was under the impression that it was a regional term.
Groceries for a year! Now thats a planning challenge! But I am kind of envious of what must be the lack of bedazzling market-able goods, that grocers are not fighting/paying for certain top-shelf placement. I am suspicious every time I go to the grocery store, that its all the same stuff in different bottles on different shelves. How DOES one calculate toilet paper needs for a year?
P.S. Canadians call it ‘pop’. Americans call it ‘soda’. Thats why we have a border.
And here I thought we had a border to keep all the colours on the map from running together.