Hot coffee and hot chocolate, on offer in a thermos right on the bikes. What could be more homey on a long trip than that? Well how about hot oatmeal, or soup, or noodles, right at your tent door? What these things have in common is that they are hot, and they are conveniently at hand. What they also have in common is that to do them you need a stove and fuel, and ingredients, and you need to have carried them in to wherever you think your homey home is to be.

As with most Grampies puzzlers, organizing this would at first seem to be quite simple. But look. To run a stove you need fuel, and airlines will not carry it. so you need to find it wherever the tour is starting. And that means the correct fuel for the particular stove. We went through this in Key West, and it took us 500km to find the right gas cannister and get cooking. Meanwhile we had bought a super heavy Coleman one burner stove and propane cannisters. We dragged this around for the next 4000 km!

So what do we do this time: Hope to find "real" butane cannisters at Walmart in Kona, or bring our heavy Coleman stove (after all, we now own two of them - both mostly unused) and buy heavy cannisters for it at Walmart in Kona, and again in Hilo? Or how about buying a true international multifuel stove (designed for remote, undeveloped areas - like the USA), and buy a litre of gasoline at a service station in Kona? However, Dodie (fearless of explosive gas) is leery of gasoline, white, gas, or kerosene. Mostly she seems to be leery that spills will make our stuff smell. I am not leery, but also I do not want to do the cookng. Of course we could also plan to dine in cafes.

The cafes sound tempting, but really we have not much more confidence in finding those when needed that we do in finding fuel.

We are just on or way home from Seattle as this is being written, so we stopped in at a Walmart Supercentre as a test case of finding butane cannisters at Walmart. We were pretty stoked, because we had found it at Fred Meyer - a local Walmart competitor. Well, our hopes were dashed - nothing but Coleman everything.

So here's the decision. When in Rome...do as the Romans do. When in the USA, use super heavy Coleman junk. Actually, we can't 100% bring ourselves to do that. We will also bring our MSR Superfly and drag ourselves over to Walmart when we hit Kona. Hope springs eternal...

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**Flash** It's October 15 now, not so long before we fly. The heavy Coleman stove is standing by the door. It wants to make sure we don't back out at the last moment and leave it behind.

People have kindly written to us suggesting both wood and alcohol stove alternatives. We have gone to our outdoors stores and looked at both, but could not bring ourselves to go for either solution.

But hah! Today I had the idea of thinking outside the (big) box. Rather than trying to rely on not reliable Walmart staff to see if butane cannisters are carried at Walmart Kona, I just searched for "sporting goods" in general. This turned up Sports Authority, one in Kona, one in Hilo. Phone calls to both locations produced reliable sounding staff, who assured me that they have MSR cannisters. That heavy Coleman rig standing guard at the door is not going to like this!