Once again today, I found myself saying, "Here I am in the middle of the Pacific and I find myself ..." Today, "..." was "grocery shopping." The final resupply/crew change trip to Lae Island will leave on Sunday night, so we needed to go grocery shopping. Two of the three crew members aren't here, yet, so we had to forecast what they will want.

The shopping trip was a little out of the ordinary. Betty Symonds of the TRMM Project Office, Udaysankar Nair (who is going to Lae), and I met at Building 1009 and drove a stepvan to the Surfway, Kwajalein's supermarket. We were allowed to come during restocking hours so that we wouldn't conflict with regular shoppers. In order to charge the groceries to the project, we had to write down each item's name, size, quantity, and Universal Price Code. It took over an hour and a half to fill two carts. Eventually we found almost everything on the list, except some produce and six cans of insect spray. One of the store employees checked the order out, then the groceries were loaded into the van. Back it went to 1009. The dry goods (and some already on hand) were put in the warehouse behind the building. The frozen and chilled food was temporarily put in the full-size side-by-side refrigerator/freezer that KWAJEX put into 1009.

The dry goods and other items, including five cases of radiosondes, are to be palletized (put on standard wooden pallets and wrapped with plastic) in the warehouse, then it all will be loaded on the LCU. An hour before departure time the frozen and chilled items will be pulled out of storage in 1009 and driven to the LCU (again in the step van) for stowage in the LCU's refrigerated hold.

I split off on the way back to 1009 and bought the six cans of insect spray at the Ten-Ten, but nowhere could I find Frisbees or the equivalent. One of the current team members on Lae requested four as gifts for the Marshallese children, but it looks like we're out of luck on this one. I actually had to walk the half mile to 1009, since that's where my bike was. Being a little sore from all this biking, it was a good change of pace.

The Surfway (yes, the name is a take-off on the supermarket chain back in the States) mostly resembles a small-town supermarket. There are probably more big-time brand names than you might expect, and the produce section is pretty nice. The oddest thing at the Surfway is that the freezer section is huge. Virtually all the meat, right down to the pre-packaged lunch meat, and all the bread products from off-island are frozen. As with the food-service establishments, fresh and frozen products at the Surfway depend on timely shipments of air cargo since there isn't any large-scale agricultural capacity in the area that can serve Kwajalein's demand for fresh vegetables and fruits.

One small victory in our freight shipping situation is that the last six cases of radiosondes made it here only two days after they were expected. We theorize that they got put on as "filler" because cartons are so light.

George Huffman