Park and Shop

Does anyone outside of my family remember a game called “Park and Shop”? It’s a board game from Milton Bradley, and the goal is to move your car and pedestrian pieces from home to a parking lot. Then you must move your pedestrian through town accomplishing several errands before returning to your car and heading home. If your pedestrian landed on an unlucky box, you might have to pick a card that would add another item to your list.

I played this game often at my grandparents’ house and from it learned how to plan out my errands in the most effective way possible.Unfortunately, my skills failed me yesterday.

This week I am house sitting for my parents while they are in Mexico. Really I am dog sitting, but I guess the house needs to be taken care of as well. Yesterday I went down to San Isidro to do several errands. Within the first few minutes of my walk, I realized I had already made a strategic mistake. I was headed to the post office, when it would make more sense to start at the butcher’s. So I turned around, and headed to the butcher first. Then I began to walk back to the post office only to realize that I should have gone to our little super market right from the beginning. Oh well, adding it on now would only make things worse. Post office to mail 80 letters? Check. Vegetable stand for ingredients for tonight’s stroganoff? Check. Walk four blocks past my taxi stop to the super market to buy other odds and ends? Check.

In all I had to walk 13 blocks to finish all my errands. If I had thought through it all correctly, if I had used my park and shop abilities, it should have taken me only 9. I fear my mom would have been disappointed in my park and shop abilities yesterday. But really, she shouldn’t complain; I’m taking care of her dog. :-)