Whew! What a shopping trip that was! We spent three days in Salt Lake City shopping for food storage (and eating) with our good friends from Montana. It was a great experience and we think this will become a yearly tradition… I need to start saving my money now 🙂
To keep this post a little more manageable, I’ll do an in-depth post on the items later as I use them or pack them away. Keep in mind, this is only day one of our shopping weekend! There are more posts to come!
These first two pictures are of the snow-covered mountains and the view from our hotel room when we arrived on Saturday morning. I love the snow, I love cold weather, and I was hoping for more snow! There was no snow on the ground when we arrived and I left the hotel blinds up all night so I could watch to see if it did start to snow.
And at 2:22 am my hubby woke me to tell me that it was snowing! I smiled, stared at it for a while and then fell back asleep. In the morning we awoke to the beautiful picture on the left. But I suppose I’m jumping ahead in the story because we did spend the rest of our arrival day shopping at some of the stores closer to our hotel. Let me fill you in on the rest of our arrival day.
Our first stop was Emergency Essentials on University Parkway. This was our second visit to this store. We’ve shopped there once before on a trip back from visiting our friends in Montana. It is a medium-sized store and they have very helpful clerks. I really enjoyed the fountain display where you could demo the water filter systems. We didn’t get a water filter this time, but we did pick up some items that I’ve been wanting after watching a video on a water bottle, cup and pocket stove on the Survive2Day YouTube channel. Here’s a list of what we purchased at Emergency Essentials (a picture of the items follows the list).
- Backpack, from clearance rack
- (2) Hotties hand warmers
- (2) Hotties feet warmers
- Pocket stove with 12 small fuel cells
- MRE
- Blue water bottle
- Stainless steel cup
- Solar battery charger
- (2) Fruit roll-up dehydrator trays
- Set of hard plastic utensils
- (2) disposable toothbrushes
I think we got a great deal on the backpack. Our friend found it on the clearance rack. It was there because it had a small rip in a seam at the top. But I can fix that up easy enough with a needle and some thread. We’re going to use this as our get-home-bag. Now I just need to fill it up!
Even though we’d only shopped at one store so far, we had been driving all day, so it was time to sit down, relax, eat, and catch up with our friends. So we stopped at Golden Corral for dinner. If you ever have a chance to eat there, I’d highly suggest you take the opportunity. I really like the food, especially the fresh grilled steak!!!
After dinner my friend spotted a Hobby Lobby across the street… you guessed it, that was our next stop! I’ve never been to a Hobby Lobby and I really liked it. I know, I know, it’s not food storage, but hey, this post is about shopping too… right?!? The picture to the right shows the things I bought there. It doesn’t include a beautiful resin cross that we picked up too. But you’ll see that hung on a wall in another picture later. And all the items, except for the crochet thread and cross were on sale!
Our next and final stop for the evening was the local WalMart. I remember that they had an Emergency Preparedness section in the back of the store and wanted to see if anything was new since our last visit. It was the same as before and I was once again disappointed that it seemed so disorganized. Kinda like someone forget that section was even in the store. We didn’t buy any food storage there because it was mostly Augason Farms products and we’d planned on going to the outlet store on Monday. But… I did get a great pair of cold weather boots on sale! I needed to buy them because I’d left both pair of my warm boots back at home. All I had with me was my pair of slip on tennis shoes that I wear when traveling. If it snowed, I was going to be miserable! So into the cart went the boots along with a bottle of chocolate milk for my hubby 🙂
So that’s about it for our first day! If you have any questions, on the items we purchased, just leave a comment below.
My Food Storage Journey 
Your blog made me smile today. I just found it and have read through some of your adventures. You did a great job in posting your adventure and wanted to tell you that I too am getting ready to embark on the same adventure. I just purchased a pressure canner, and canning equipment (just the basics for now). I have no gardening, canning, nor prepping experience but here I go. I just wanted to say thanks for sharing your experiences and hope to see more of your blog updates! I would love to share mine with you. Best wishes!
Thank you for your comment Teri! Glad you started prepping. You’ll see it will become a lifestyle. It has for me (and my husband). I think the biggest change is how I shop now. My grocery list is not about a weekly menu, but more about what’s on sale and what shelves need to be filled in my extended pantry. 🙂 Send me an email any time you have question or need some help. I have lots of great resources that I can send your way.
🙂