Medora, North Dakota
After driving a thankfully short distance in heavy rain from Glendive to Medora yesterday, we parked Homer into his new spot for the next three nights–the Red Trail Campground.
Medora is a quaint historic western town that targets tourists. Activities include a cowboy fondue where steak is cooked on a pitchfork and a Broadway musical that entertains 2000 people every night all summer long.
Today was chore day–laundry and shopping.
There’s no grocery store in Medora, so we drove to Dickenson and visited Walmart.
This was actually more entertaining and informative than driving to Williston. It felt like the Bizarro World Seinfeld episode where everything is nearly the same but oddly different.
The Walmart is very new and it looks like it was built in a hurry because there’s no rock work on the outside. Even though it was raining buckets, there were no rugs at the entrance. Here’s a press picture of the store in Williston when it opened last year, and it looks like a carbon copy of the Dickenson store.
The changes from Idaho and Nevada Walmarts where I normally shop didn’t stop at the door.
Three-quarters of the vehicles parked outside were pickups, most covered in mud and oversized for the parking spaces.
Three-quarters of the shoppers were male. I hate to be sexist, but most men look tortuously uncomfortable in grocery stores, and the ones we saw today were no exception.
Men under 35 shopped in packs of at least four. Those over 35 shopped alone and actually used a basket or cart.
The floor of the produce section was filthy. I watched one man grab a bag of lettuce. He examined it for about thirty seconds while the contents poured out on the floor from a hole in the back. Once he realized what was happening, he casually tossed the half empty bag back in the pile.
Rich was looking for a part for his bicycle. When we ran into one another, his eyes were huge. 🙂 People were riding the bikes in the aisles and leaving them wherever they felt like it. He dodged bike riders down the entire aisle.
He then decided he needed some more wine and beer, so we went looking for it but never found it. Finally I decided to just ask a guy who looked like he drank beer. “Excuse me,” I said, “we’re not from around here. Do you know if we have to go to a special store to buy beer and wine?” He laughed and said, “Hell, I don’t know… I’m from Texas!”
Rich finally found someone who knew. The beer and wine is sold separately in a small, self-enclosed room that has its own entrance at the front of the store. When he went to buy some, the room only had one other customer. His purchase was bagged in a brown paper bag set inside a Walmart bag by a woman he said looked like she’d been tasting the inventory.
I left in search of cereal, specifically two types of bran cereal. Apparently the majority of oil drillers aren’t constipated because there was no bran cereal in sight. 🙂
A few years ago I listened to two early 30-something sportscasters debate the ‘perfect’ morning cereal. After taking calls from their listeners (in the same age and sociodemographic group as them), the hand down favorite was Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
As I looked for my bran cereal in the cereal aisle, I laughed outloud. The Cinnamon Toast Crunch section was empty except for two boxes on the bottom shelf.
Apparently, the best majority of fracking workers, or at least those shopping at Walmart, are early 30-something men…