Been trying to get out now and then to see what’s around here besides boring old Las Vegas. Well, Vegas isn’t totally boring; we’ve been there, done that, and got an eye full of half naked women walking down the strip, which must be the new reason to call it that since I don’t remember them walking around like that when I was a kid..!! Not that I am complaining, I am not!
Friday night we drove to Crystal Springs, just north of Alamo. Crystal Springs may be on the map, but it isn’t on the road. In fact, apart from only a handful of houses, it really only consisted in a road junction with a stand of trees nearby, and this…
Just south of Crystal Springs is a small town called Alamo, which we loved as a place to visit. I don’t think any of is would be naïve enough to actually want to live there though. It is so small that I am sure everybody would be in your pocket seeing everything you do, everywhere you go… It is small, small, small. And it is far enough out to be isolated! It is well over 100 miles to Las Vegas, and there is virtually nothing in between. Alamo sits in the kind of open spaces that almost doesn’t exist in America anymore.
After visiting the Alamo Sinclair gas station and grocery store we took a tour around and looked at the homes that make up this place on a map that almost doesn’t exist in the real world. There were some new houses dotted amid some old ones that reflect the old Utah architecture that you often see in Salt Lake City, with rounded door tops, and steep gables. But the one house that really caught my eye was one with straight roof lines atop curved walls, nicely painted in a perfect patch of blue, looking tiny in the large yard it sat it.
This is someone’s castle!!!
Saturday morning we got our first order through an organization called Bountiful Baskets. It is a Co-Op which allows us to order online up to three baskets per week at $15 per basket. Each “basket” is actually two laundry baskets full of fruit and vegetables at about a 50/50 ratio. The food has been bought from the same place that the grocery stores buy their food, so there is nothing special about that. But what they do actually get you is claimed to be about $50 of food for $15. We found our baskets for this first week actually consisted of about $30 of food, but that still represents a 50% discount to the price of store bought. How do you complain about that? Maybe it was a low week for the buyers? Whatever the case, all labor is voluntary, and there is no overhead, so they keep costs low. The food is bought, then brought to the local school, in our case Grant Bowler Elementary, and distributed from there. We literally picked up on the curb in the school’s parking lot. There is only a 20 minute window to pick up in, so the volunteers can go home and get on with their day.
The website is http://www.bountifulbaskets.org/ and if you live in one of their areas, you only need to pay $3.00 to sign up for the first delivery, which covers the cost of your laundry baskets, (which you do not get to take home with you, so bring your own carriers!) and with each transaction you pay $1.50 to cover the cost of transaction fees. The rest of your money is spent on food.
Here’s our pick-up location!
Here’s our $15 worth of food in the baskets!
And although we did not choose any bread, here is what is on offer for an additional cost of something like $8 or $10. You get five loaves of 9 grain sandwich bread. Okay, we did not get them first time around, but I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind trying them in the future!
In all, I do recommend Bountiful Baskets. The food is of sufficient quantity and quality to make add value to your dollar!
So now it’s Sunday morning. Missus wanted to get up and do some yard work, and enlist the help of the rest of us to get it done, but when I got up at 7:00 it was nearly 90 degrees out, humid, cloudy, and when I went back in to wiggle her toe to wake her to get started, thunder rolled. She hated lightning, so I apologized and told her to go back to sleep!
Maybe I should go back to sleep too!
Kelsey J Bacon