Go Get Car Share

Before moving to Sydney, we got rid of all our vehicles - one way or another (tongue in cheek here).  Jim thought it would be a good idea for us to join Go Get.  It's a car share program.  The Go Get cars are parked in various areas (a lot near us).  You can go online or on an app on your phone and reserve a car for any amount of time that is available.  There are three different programs: Get Started, Go Occasional or Go Frequent.  We decided to Get Started in the beginning.  With this program, you pay $49 for the credit/background check then you pay like $14/hour and like $0.20/km.  If you reserve the car for a day, it caps at like $68/day or something like that.  Anyhoo, you don't have to pay for insurance or gasoline.  It is provided by Go Get.  There is a fuel card in the glove box and everything.  You just have to make sure you park the car where you found it with at least a quarter of a tank of gas.

So anyway, we decided to reserve Barbara, the Hyundai i30 for 2 hours to go to a REAL grocery store.  Jim found a Woolworth's with a parking lot in Neutral Bay... not far from us.  So we loaded up the car and headed out.  We had not been in a real grocery store in almost 2 months.  You should have seen our faces!  How exciting!  However, it didn't last long.  First of all, we were late getting to the car.  By the time we got to Woolworth's, we only had an hour and a half left before the car had to be parked back where we found it.  You may think this is plenty of time.  That's what I thought.  But remember... I had no idea what aisle contained what.  Not to mention that most groceries in Sydney are COMPLETELY different from what we buy in America.  So you can't even buy the same things you are used to buying.  By the time it was 11:00am, Jim is constantly looking at his watch and pointing and I had not even found saline solution or the milk or frozen food or minced chicken.  (The minced chicken was sort of an add-on because we decided to break down and buy a pan to cook something in instead of only eating frozen stuff for the next month or so.)

First of all, saline solution is not sold in stores.  I'm going to have to go to a chemist or to Priceline to buy it.  I got most of the other stuff, but then went through the checkout only to find that the total was $420.  I thought I would have a heart attack.  I just never want to go through that again.  I would much rather just take the train into Town Hall, run into Woolworth's for whatever we need for the next couple of days and then take the train back.

We decided to walk over to Sydney CBD to go to Priceline for my saline solution.  It's not like I'm in danger of running out tonight, but I guess Jim just wanted to go for a really long walk for ice cream.  We get over to Priceline only to find out that they are closed on Sundays.  We should have known.  So then Jim suggests that we take the ferry home, since the ferry stops down the road from our apartment.  But the next ferry was going to be in an hour.  We just bought an ice cream at Copenhagen's (same as price of ferry ticket!) and walked back home.