When I am in the US, I consistently can’t find things in supermarkets. I just can’t find them, no matter how hard I look. My eyes scan aisles and shelves and inevitably the thing I am looking for is nowhere to be found. More often than not, I ask for help.

This isn’t really a problem elsewhere – I mean, once, probably a week into my life in London, that I figured out that eggs were kept on shelves and not in refrigerators in UK supermarkets, I think I’ve very seldom had to ask a supermarket employee for anything. But this is an ongoing thing for me in the US.

Why? Is it that so many US supermarkets are jam-packed with food products, groaning and overstuffed, making things harder to find? Is it that I am American and feel that things in my home country should be self-evident and require no labour, no work to decipher?

When I am on the road, I almost never ask for assistance in a supermarket. Part of this is that I am often just excited to be in an unfamiliar commercial space, observing the items for sale. Part of if is that when i am travelling I am usually not cooking or looking for staples. But another part of it is that I am more self-reliant and alert – smarter in general, I think – when I am travelling.

I’m about to leave on a big round-the-world trip, the kind I tend to do every three to five years. My last trip of this type was in early 2020; completely accidentally, the trip concluded just before things went haywire. I spent most of 2020 and 2021 dreaming about the sort of an adventure I’m about to begin. This one is a doozy. It was unpredictable to map out, an itinerary forced to take some unexpected turns due to glitches that might not strictly speaking have anything to do with the pandemic but didn’t ever seem to happen before 2020. I dealt with these challenges on the fly: I approached things as if I were in a supermarket in an unfamiliar place, not the Portland New Seasons where I shop for meals on my frequent visits to Oregon, where things seem to never be in the right place.

In terms of travel, 2022 was about family visits, London, & Lisbon, and a few adventures. I walked through and literally around London. I visited Menton and Trieste for long weekends. I spent a week in Vienna and a few days in Innsbruck and Lugano. From Portland, I took my nephew to Vancouver and spent some time on Orcas Island with my mother, sister, and stepsisters. I had an exhilarating week in Fiji with an old friend. I coped with various unsatisfying corporate travel machinations, finally saying goodbye to Airbnb and shaming Delta on Twitter for trying to get out of a reimbursement I had been promised.

Sometimes it’s not about how you finesse the supermarket you’re currently in; rather, it’s about leaving the supermarket altogether to find another.