Nat's Stump Sprouts Adventure

It's been a peaceful summer on campus so far, and I've been slacking on blog posts. Fortunately, Nat's got it covered. Here's a report from his trip to the Crawford homestead:

My training hasn't been particularly exciting yet this summer, but I was recently given the opportunity to head down to western Mass last weekend for Nick's sister's wedding (unfortunately, I did not win the contest to be the groom). The roads in Brunswick have been pretty good to me so far, but I was excited for a free trip to Stump Sprouts (Nick's family's lodge/ski area), because there are some serious hills in the area--so serious, in fact, that the local bike race is called the "Tour of the Hill Towns."

Saturday morning, before the wedding in the afternoon, I did a couple of threshold intervals on Nick's driveway, West Hill Road. "Driveway" doesn't nearly do justice to this hunk of road, but that's what Nick calls it--it's about a mile from the bottom to his house, and another quarter mile or so to the top. I'd estimate the grade at between 10 and 15 percent the whole way. I think hills are pretty fun, so this was a decently good time, and there were lots of wedding attendees around to motivate me. Nick doesn't really believe in doing intervals this time of year, so he hopped on a bike and heckled me for the last little bit of my first repeat. Also, there's a farm at the bottom of the hill, and I ran past a crusty old farmer on his tractor on my way up--he told me that I needed to get some longer legs so I could run uphill faster.

Saturday evening was the wedding. I'll spare everyone the full story, but one highlight was finding Fred the UVM assistant coach's hat as I was cleaning up (Nick's parents had hired me to work at the wedding). He'd been looking for it earlier in the evening, and I managed to get it to him as he was sitting in his car with a GPS mapping the route back to Burlington. I know Fred as the guy who's always on the side of the trail with a old-school computer giving splits to the UVM team, so I told him I'd trade him his hat for splits at all the carnivals this winter. He agreed, and even told me he would put my name in all-caps, an honor usually reserved solely for Catamounts.

Sunday Nick and I cruised out on an easy classic distance rollerski, which turned into a bit of a sufferfest on the second half of our loop. The road to his house is up a river valley, and it's downhill on the way out, but not enough for you to really take notice, and it hits you hard on the way back. Sunday was especially rough because it was hot, and the sun was shining right in our faces, but we finished up no worse for the wear.

That workout account is a bit truncated because I really wanted to just skip to the last part of this entry, which was our visit to Phantom Fireworks in Seabrook, New Hampshire. We were driving back up 295 on Sunday evening from Massachusetts, and I think it was Nick who decided that we needed to stop to pick up some pyrotechnics for the fourth of July. We found the exit, took it, and parked in front of the store. We walked in the front door, and before we could so much as set one foot in the shop 17 people--including an armed security guard (armed as in gun, not as in appendage) turned and yelled at us to go over to the other door. We did, and were greeted by a huge sign that listed the store's various restrictions, which were something like this:

YOU MUST BE 21 OR OVER TO PURCHASE FIREWORKS

CHILDREN UNDER 21 MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY AN ADULT

NO CIGARETTES

NO PROFANITY

BUY ONE GET ONE FREE

NONE OF THESE FIREWORKS ARE MISSILES--MISSILES ARE ILLEGAL

As soon as we walked in, we were greeted by a Phantom Fireworks employee, and, since Nick is over 21, he had to supply them with his driver's license so they could print him a slip of paper authorizing him to purchase fireworks. After this, we started looking around--basically, this was the sketchiest place I have ever seen. I can't really explain why this was the case, but here are a few of the contributing factors:

1. There had to be like 15 or 20 people working in this store, and we were just about the only ones shopping at it.

2. Half of the employees seemed just like me, as in, they couldn't believe that a store this cool existed, and even less that they had jobs working at it. For example, the guy who wrote up Nick's profile kidded with me when I asked if smoking was allowed--he told me it was encouraged. HOWEVER, the other half of the employees seemed like the creepy pyromaniac people that you would expect to work at a fireworks store. For example, there were these fireworks that looked a lot like missiles (there was a sign next to them that said that even though they looked like missiles, they actually were not), and I asked another employee if these would be the best kind for shooting at other people. After assuring me that these weren't actually missiles, he directed me to another aisle where he showed me a box of roman-candle like objects, telling me seriously that "these are the best in the store." This gets better. After we'd been looking around for a while, he found us and said that he wanted to make sure that I knew that the roman candle fireworks had a report, which meant that they exploded after you shot them, and that I probably shouldn't actually shoot them at people.

3. The fireworks were really, really expensive, like, $150 a box (we bought the cheapest ones--$15 for two boxes, since we got one for free). And there were people in the store who looked like they probably should have been spending their money on health or dental care, not fireworks.

4. The armed security guard with bleach-blond tips behind the checkout.

5. The fact that fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts and Maine, yet this store is like 2 miles from the Mass border and not that much further from the Maine one.

Bottom line: This was a successful and entertaining weekend, with some decent but by no means difficult training. Look for another more training-centric blog post in the future.