AI planned our RV meals and filled my Walmart cart—except for the pork tenderloin we planned to grill at camp

Anybody who's ever gone camping knows that getting ready for the trip—RV, tent, whatever—is basically just deciding how much of your house you're going to drag with you.

It's kitchen stuff and groceries and pet supplies and clothes and toiletries and all the little things you swear you're going to remember until you're forty miles down the road and suddenly realize you forgot one very specific thing. Packing the RV takes basically a full day, after several other days of gathering things up and making lists and trying to remember everything. And then, somehow, after all of that, you still have to go grocery shopping.

Jason and I were getting ready for this desert trip in the RV, and I was running out of time because... well. Me. I'm always running out of time.

I've used AI before to help put grocery lists together, and I've talked about that. But this trip had two new pieces. First, we live a little ways out from the main towns, so grocery delivery hadn't really been an option for us before. Walmart had just expanded its delivery area to include our house, which was genuinely exciting because I still had a ridiculous amount left to do.

And second, Walmart had added a connector inside ChatGPT so you could shop. Naturally, I assumed that meant the whole thing. Find the stuff, put it in the cart, done. Human optimism. Very dangerous.

So I did what I normally do. I was taking pictures of shelves and talking through what we already had, and Eric helped me figure out what we actually needed for the camping trip. We came up with several meals we could grill at camp, built the grocery list around those, and he checked what the Rifle Walmart had available.

Then we get to the part where we're ready to actually put everything in the cart... and discover Walmart hadn't connected that part yet. You could browse. You could search. You could check products. You could do everything right up until the moment where you wanted to, you know, buy groceries.

I had a very brief panic.

And then I realized, okay, fine. I don't actually need the connector for that part. I moved the list into a ChatGPT work session and had Eric use my logged-in browser to fill the Walmart cart directly.

Before I turned him loose, I told him there were a few things I wanted to pick myself. Stuff I couldn't really describe cleanly in a prompt and just wanted to look at. So he filled the cart with the bulk of the order and stopped before doing anything final.

Then I opened the cart, looked everything over, added the couple of things I wanted to browse for myself, switched the order over to our newly available home delivery, put in the delivery instructions, and submitted it.

And within about three hours, groceries showed up at the house. I took the bags from the driver and carried them straight into the RV. Which was glorious. No driving into town. No wandering Walmart with a list. No checkout line. No hauling everything back home before I could even start loading the RV.

The funny part came later, when we were actually out at the campsite.

I'd planned several meals for the trip, so one evening I ask Jason, "Okay, what do you want me to grill tonight?"

He says, "How about the pork tenderloin?"

And I go, "Oh, that's a great idea. Let's do that."

So I get everything ready, open the RV refrigerator...

No pork tenderloin.

The tenderloin had made it onto the list. But Eric couldn't find that specific one for pickup, left it out of the cart, and told me. When I switched the order to delivery and reviewed the cart before placing it, I still missed that we needed a replacement. So the pork tenderloin had, for dinner purposes, vanished from civilization.

So, yes, that was disappointing. Eric and I had a little heart-to-heart about the missing tenderloin afterward.

But everything else worked really well. Even with one absent piece of pork, handing off the meal planning and most of the cart-building, then taking the groceries straight from the delivery driver into the RV, was dramatically easier than driving to town and doing the whole thing myself. So the system worked. Mostly. The tenderloin died for our progress.