THE LIGHT SIDE OF BARGAINS

The DH and I have been away on a little holiday visiting family.  People take holidays for different reasons and some holidays are for relaxing, sports, sightseeing, shopping, culture, cooking, visiting, and/or gambling.  My holidays will cover a variety of activities but you can be assured that shopping is always included.  I have never been on a holiday where no purchases were made.  We all love finding a good bargain whether it is a food item, clothes or beauty product.  I actually will look for bargains that cover a wide gamat.  I will take the time browsing for things while on holidays that I would never do while at home and running the usual weekend errands.  You need to have patience to browse and be in the mood to try clothes on if you are in a clothing store.  I have found much patience during this holiday and have done a lot of browsing.  I did find a number of bargains and was pleased with all of my 'finds'.  Of course you cross compare the prices to what you would have paid at home and whether this item is something that you can't find at home or is such a deal that it is worth stuffing into your heavy suitcase.  I have fulfilled my tee-shirt fetish on this trip.

Starbucks, Trader Joe's and Target is a 14 minute walk from where I am staying and after walking for an hour or so in the morning, the route home usually involved going to Starbucks and then maybe dropping into Trader Joe's or Target.  For those of you that haven't been to a Trader Joe's, it is a great grocery store.  Both of these stores open at 8 am each day so it is quite convenient to involve them in the Starbuck's route.  One morning I went into Target with my skinny vanilla latte in hand.  How good does this get - Life is Good.  A big store with many bargains.  I decided that I needed to find some shower gel and spent time studying the various shower gels on the shelves.  I settled on rainbath shower gel from Neutrogena.  It was a great price and I like the Neutrogena product line.  The bottle I bought is enough for at least a month or two's worth of daily showers.  What do I do with the shower gel after a week's worth of washing as we would be going home??  I hadn't made much of a dent in the amount of shower gel used.  No one else would use it if I left it so I decided to take it home.  As it has a pump handle, packing it in the same bottle with the pump made me nervous as my luck and murphy's law would dictate that somehow in travel transit, the pump would get depressed or turned and I would end up with soap all over the suitcase.  So I had to find a travel container to transfer the shower gel into. Of course this required browsing through stores and looking for travel containers for my $5.99 shower gel.  Some effort went into finding a container including lots of gas.  I looked at Glad containers, travel bottles and other modes of storage.  During my investigation, I never thought of the size of travel bottle I really needed to find, this was a minor detail.  I was consumed with the type of closure the bottle needed to have.  I ended up buying a solid water bottle for $1 at the 99 cent store which by the way is a great store.  My rainbath shower gel bottle is 250 ml and the bottle I bought is a litre.  Such minor details.   The liquid left in the Neutrogena bottle is some water I put in to wash the remnants of soap left before putting the bottle in the recycle bin.  God love me.