adventures of a canoelover

Harry, contemplating the Universe …

…and his gourmet lollipop from Gramma.

Post trade show I usually head for home right away, but I haven’t had a lot of time off this summer so I took a couple of extra days on the backside to visit the family. My mom lives an hour south of SLC, so we were based out of Orem, Utah.

I say based out of, as we tried to get out of Orem as much as possible. Orem is a giant strip mall with more payday loan and pawn shops per square mile than I’ve seen outside Detroit. Orem, if you’ll excuse my candor, is the Schaumburg Illinois of Utah without the big mall. Orem is a good place to be from.*

Now Provo, just a few blocks south, is a lovely little town with a real downtown and a beautiful campus (BYU), cute houses and parks. Pretty town.

We took advantage of the proximity of Orem to Sundance. For five bucks you can spend an hour riding the chair lift and just enjoy the scenery without freezing. The quad is perfect for our family. I am not as skilled in self-portraits as Whitney so this is as good as it gets.

We played around, ate some home-cooked food and visited with my brother and sister who live in Orem too. Had some fun shooting pics of Harry, my sister’s youngest, who is very photogenic and an absolute riot. He loves to wrestle, and at one point declared that “Uncle Darren has small muscles. I have HUGE muscles.” Then he jumped on my head.

Then I sent a text message to my brother regarding his eminent fatherhood (number four). We are both sometimes men of few words. No, really. Here’s proof.

More later on the San Rafael Swell,

Canoelover

*Not all Orem is hideously ugly and unlivable. There a few small oases such as Kristin‘s parent’s garden, which is fantastic…as are her parents. These are really good people and I wish they lived in Wisconsin with us.

After the sparkling beauty of a trade show, tear down is a bit like carnage. Seconds after (and sometimes before) the end of the trade show, out come the boxes, packing tape and little tool boxes marked “SHOW BOOTH.” Within minutes the booths are unrecognizable as such…people who do long trade shows are anxious to get out quickly.

I don’t blame them. As a retailer I am free to walk out anytime I want with nothing more than a brief case full of catalogs and pricelists. These poor souls must tear down their entire booth structure, pack up all the product, and ship it off to the next place. Oftimes that next show is a week later.

It’s always amazing to see dozens of plain white trailers waiting for the tons of boxes and crates that are going to storage until the next show. Most of the larger manufacturers have show booths that are stored except for a few days a year. It’s pretty amazing.

Sometimes I’ll stick around and help a smaller manufacturer who is short on help. We helped Hurricane Aquasports tear down since they had a good number of boats to move and only a few helpers. We had it down in less than 90 minutes, a record I think.

Made some new friends, reinforced some existing ones, and saw some great new product. I had a great breakfast with Nathan, the new paddlesports buyer for REI. Great guy, and he had a lot of nice things to say about Rutabaga.

Until January,

Canoelover

We re-entered paradise at 10:31 pm, crossing Big Muddy at Dubuque. I have plenty of material for blog postings for the next couple of weeks.

Humidity is good.

Hearing insects in the cornfields is good.

Having a car that can go 3500 miles without a hiccup is good.

Having a family that loves roadtrips is good.

Being back home is best of all.

Sleepily submitted,

Canoelover

I need sleep. Sweet, nourishing sleep.

A long, long day but a good day. Lots of cool new stuff, lots of great people.

Sadly, I left my camera cables in my luggage with my wife, so there will be no pictures for a while. Trust me, Outdoor Retailer is good this year.

Somnambulistically submitted,

Canoelover

Highlights:

• The Farmer’s Market on the way to the Salt Palace.
• Cool new gear from a bunch of manufacturers.
• Finding small entrepreneurial companies filling niches no one thought possible to do.
• The Legacy Paddlesports Party where I got to play the mandolin with Mike Hooks.
• The Legacy Paddlesports Party where I got to see Andy take an Ultimate 9.5 down a pool slide.
• Getting random text messages from MK.
• The early morning Red Bull I swiped from Riot. Disgusting but necessary after five hours of sleep.

Lowlights:

• Unquestionably bad product from select vendors. On which planet did they do their market research? I know that assumes a lot…like they actually did research.
• Not eating lunch.
• Listening to insufferable buyers from other shops who kept saying “Y’know, this boat would be a lot better if you just…” I had to run screaming…

Overheard:

Someone made a comment about something I didn’t understand: Raves.

Me: “Vicks Vapo-Rub and Ecstacy? I don’t get it…”
Roger: “Yeah, Ravers rub it all over their bodies during a rave.”
Me: “Wow. Sounds painful.”

[pregnant pause]

Anonymous Voice from the Backseat: “It sounds worse than it really is.”

Just another day at the office,

Canoelover

Trade shows are pretty grueling. You start early, you work late, and you get laryngitis from talking too much. Still, it’s a family reunion and even though it’s tiring, it’s also a rush.

Great meetings today with some amazing vendor partners. I really love working in my industry…the people are great.

We did hear about a few “price adjustments” which made Scott and I look at each other and smirk. One vendor, Aquabound, announced a price decrease. That is an adjustment that I can live with.

We ended the evening with a nice sushi dinner with the gang from NRS. It’s great to work with friends.

Sleepily submitted,

Canoelover

Wow. Long drive. Nice visit with my family. Nice dinner with my wife. Test paddling some fine new boats (and some crappy ones).

Now the fun part is over. It’s time for line presentations.

For those of you who are NOT in the outdoor industry, here’s how it works.

A Sales Rep shows you all the cool stuff they make, and they tell you why you should buy it.

Many of these reps are competent, nice, hard-working people. Alas, some are not. Those are the ones that just nod and smile a lot.

So here’s a list of terms you might hear during a line presentation (and its English translation).

This means “Be very careful, it’s the only one we have and if you break it I will lose my job and possibly my life.”

“This is pre-production.”

This means “I can’t really make any changes to this product because the mold is done, but if you want to pretend you have input on the design, I’ll pretend too.”

“These will ship August 15th.”

The correct response to this is a simple and sincere “August 15th of which year?”

“These are sourced offshore.”

This means the product is made in China, probably by small children chained to sewing machines for 12 to 14 hours a day, and are not allowed to see pictures of the Dalai Lama to boot.* If you want to have some fun, ask them “which shore?”

This means prices are going up. If you think the adjustments were down, you’re smoking a high-quality brand of crack.

Since they say this to every buyer they meet, and you assume a certain heterogeneity among buyers and the heterogeneity of their local economic and sociological conditions, this basically means they have a lot of them.

Remember, the past is pretty much any time period before right now.

And my favorite:

The correct response to this is to smile and nod, then hedge your bet by ordering identical product from a similar vendor.

Let’s be careful out there, people.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

*Okay, so I exaggerate a little. So do sales reps.

Driving up Highway 14 out of Fort Collins is a treat. It goes north of the Rocky Mountain National Park so the traffic is pretty light, and it’s a lovely but winding highway. It’s tough to keep your eyes on the road because every corner has a new amazing vista. My family was becoming increasingly annoyed with me as I kept whining about not having a boat with me. Not that I would have been able to do much if I had one.

Yet another thing I wouldn’t have seen if I had been on the Interstate.

Guess which magazine this is:

A) Architectural Digest
B) Vogue
C) Esquire
D) Real Simple

If you answered D, you’re right.

Savoring the delectable irony,

Canoelover

Highway 20, near Chadron

There are two ways to get across Nebraska. There is the boring, direct way, and there is the non-boring indirect way. Interstate 80 was constructed along a riverbank to make it easier to build. Highway 20 cuts through the sandhills and buttes of northwest Nebraska.

There are a lot of reasons to take the slow boat. Here are just a few of them.

1) Accommodations. The hotels and motels along the interstate are expensive, generic boxes with no soul. The hotels along the backroads can be lovely, clean, cheap, family-owned places of lodging. True, there are the occasional Bates Motels, but if you keep your eyes open you can find places like this one.

2. Good Food. If you take the Interstate, you get a choice every ten miles of Cracker Barrels, Subways, McDonalds, or in some latitudes, Waffle Houses. With the exception of the latter, most of these are also soulless boxes with the same crappy food served with the same crappy attitude. At least you get interesting waitstaff at the Waffle Houses.

If you get off the brainless ribbon of asphalt you get places like this one. Great food, lots of it, and the total was $4.95. Half the price of Cracker Barrel. And you don’t have to walk through the tacky gift shop.

3. Interesting Sites. If you stick to the path most traveled, you miss places like this: Carhenge. It is nowhere near anything. It is not on the way to anywhere, nor is it on the way from anywhere. It has to be a destination. If you’re setting your schedule so that you can pee every 2.3 hours at a nice, clean bathroom, you’ll never see Carhenge.

Carhenge totally rocked. 60 miles out of the way, if you have a way that needs getting out of.

Ian got a Carhenge t-shirt. I went surfing on stationary cars.

3/4: Interesting Good Food Sites. Combine 3 and 4 and we’re talking Nirvana. Out of the way (again, that strange concept) was the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Museum in LeMars, Iowa.

Whit places the cherry on the giant sundae.

Lots of information on how ice cream is made, how it takes 250,000 gallons a day to feed the factory, and of course, the obligatory consumption of fresh product.

There are numerous other reasons to take the blue roads over the mindless 4-lane. Better gas mileage. The ability to pull over and stand in the middle of the highway for three or four minutes to compose a picture (try that on an interstate!). The ability to wave to people and have them wave back before you pass them. That, and the whole highway is like a giant rest area. Stop where you want.

Slow down, people. Take your time. It’s your time, so take it. Carpe tempus. Or something like that. Stop and smell the hay.

Reporting from somewhere in rural northeast Colorado,

Canoelover