Beat the System

I live in the Shopping Capitol of the World..... Salem, NH. It's a border town with MA, which has a sales tax, and we don't. So we don't have only our residents shopping here; we have all the folks from MA coming up here to beat the sales tax. Unfortunately, that only creates a horrendous amount of traffic. Any citizen of Salem knows better than to go out onto the main roads at Christmastime. This situation is what has led me to do most of my shopping online for the past several years. It's been a divine blessing to be able to do all my shopping in the comfort of my own jammies.

(Ya Huh.....That IS Me!)

However, there are certain things that you really need to go into the store and check out before you buy. So today, Hubby and I ventured out to do a bit of shopping.

Hubby wanted to do some shopping for moi this morning, so he set out and walked to all his destinations. (Hubby likes to walk a little bit more than I do).

In the afternoon, we drove to a distant location for our specialty store item, and on the way back, as luck would have it, we were passing by the exit for the beach. So........

And for our grand finale, Hubby wanted go to TOYS R US! The insanity of it just boggled my mind. But.....Hubby works long hours, and the only other time we could go would have been at night when it would be just as crazy.

It just so happens that Toys R Us is adjacent to the plaza where Market Basket is located. We parked at the end of the plaza, down where the garden shop is in the summertime. There were plenty of spaces. We then walked to Toys R Us, got our one item and walked back over to the plaza........walking gleefully past the long lines of cars waiting to get out of the parking lot.

We then walked to the other end of the plaza, got our food for supper, walked back (again, walking right past the long lines of cars trying to get out of the plaza) and drove out the back way to get home.

VOILA! Stress-free!!