Shopping for Two Fish

My visit’s second purpose was to start purchasing household and boat items to eventually load onto the boat. We spent all summer shopping online for items such as wrenches, hammers and drive tool sets (don’t worry, I still don’t know what that is) so that we could start our selection of items. I also aggregated a few household items such as pots and pans. One day we would be a floating home and needed to be self-sufficient enough to do everything from cooking all of our meals to performing minor repairs. Every item was catalogued in our Bento data base (thank you Jason) along with a photo, status and location.

How did we know what to buy? Books and blogs are overflowing with advice on this topic and you can spend your life surfing and making lists until your head explodes. Jason often comes home and needs to put the pieces back together. We had a great head start because previous owners Mark, Sarah, Neil and Shaun had assembled the best of list in an Excel spreadsheet. We thought a database would be easier to manage so have entered all of the items that we see in our future into Bento along with a few others. We supplement this with Springpad, a nifty web site that we use to save ideas for items that we might want to add. Springpad has companion iPad and iPhone apps so whether you are surfing or just walking around town, you can add an item to your Springpad list by clicking on a link or by taking a photo.

I arrived in Buenos Aires with 4 tubs and was met by my taxi who took me to our storage facility before heading to the factory. I also had a shopping list generated by Bento, listing all of the items that I was supposed to either just scout out and price or purchase while there. You can’t begin to imagine the volume of goods that need to be purchased. I was very happy that Ed and Maite were all set to accompany me on this mission.

Despite Maite’s fluent Spanish, it helped to have some data on the shops we were targeting.

I had printed out maps and location information for a few shops as well as the local Chandleries.

In addition to Walmart, we visited Easy, a Home Depot-like store. The best store is supposed to be Sodimac, near the Vincent Lopez airport. I didn’t have enough time on this visit but it will be first on my list for next time. I was able to buy a variety of items including fuel cans, towels, ‘Prohibido Fumar’ signs and the elusive oil filter wrench. I was also happy to be able to report back to Jason that Dremelville exists in Argentina as well. Same goes for WD-40, which I saw in many places, as well as Loctite.

One of our best finds was at Trimer – an oil pump for changing oil. I can’t wait to try it out.

By the time I left Argentina, I had a better idea of what we should wait to buy and what we should be stocking up on in advance of our next visit. To finish up some of our houseware shopping and for a bit of tourism, we headed to Puerto de Frutos in Tigre. Puerto de Frutos is a true working port. Riverboats from Tigre, motor through all of the inlets upriver to reach houses with no other access to goods. We finished our shopping excursion with a visit to Frog (http://www.frogbazar.com.ar/menu.html). Frog stocks lots of colorful items such as towel racks, containers and other housewares.

Shopping made us hungry, so we found a nice place to eat. All of us ate omelets, except for Rob, who opted for the “bigger than his head” sandwich. Of course, I was only thinking of my after-lunch helado. After another trip to the storage facility to deposit our purchases, I was ready for the trip home. Maybe I had too much fun to call it work, but I did feel as if I made a bit more progress and was well-prepared to do even more on our next visit.