Boys' toys in Foxboro: Bass Pro Shops

It doesn't ever take much convincing to get RG to drive up to Foxboro for some shopping. That's because Patriots' owner Bob Kraft's "Guy Mall" — now taking shape around Gillette Stadium — already includes a superstore that exerts the same attraction to men as a salt lick does to deer.
Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World is unlike any other store you've ever been to, as much about entertainment and lifestyle as it is about actually selling stuff. You see men in workboots and NASCAR jackets pushing around carts in a happy trance, and to tell the truth, it's almost as much fun for women.
The store celebrates the rugged outdoor world of hunting and fishing and sells the infinite variety of accouterments needed to pursue both. You can buy everything from a bass fishing boat to a set of plaster casts that let you tell the age of a deer by its teeth. A motion-detecting night camera lets you capture on film a fisher cat or an owl that passes by its lens. Tents, truck boxes, duck blinds, gas grills, water toys, lodge-style furniture, fish-finders, GPS, binoculars, bait, ATVs, camouflage clothing, fluorescent orange clothing, camouflage make-up and, yes, camouflage make-up remover pads.
It's all there, laid out on two floors decorated with hundreds of taxidermy specimens of moose standing in a rock-lined pool, deer leaping over the water with wolves in pursuit, bears, foxes, wild turkeys, pheasants. . . . An indoor trout stream plunges into a 30,000-gallon glass-walled aquarium where you can see real trout, bass, and catfish swimming. All over the store, animal and bird calls punctuate the background noise of rushing water or rustling leaves. A wall of windows invites you to lounge in big leather club chairs and look out upon a pond and cranberry bog populated with statues of Big Horn Sheep and other critters that you can spot through sample scopes. There's a nice restaurant for lunch that includes a Wild West-style antique bar that's always lined with rear views of men in truckers' caps or suits talking "guy" to each other.
And then there are the arcades: A shooting gallery lets you knock over varmints and set a barn door swinging to reveal a growling bear. A laser arcade sets up interactive images of bounding deer or scattering doves that you knock down with your rifle.

Our excuse for going had been to find a pair of duck shoes, which we did. But you know how guys are with shopping: We ended up spending the whole afternoon.

Border crossing to Connecticut: Logee's Greenhouse

Retired Guy and I took the TomTom over the border into Connecticut yesterday, in part to see how the little guy did in a strange country and in part to visit the tropical landscape inside the Big House greenhouse of Logee's in Danielson. A family business since 1892, Logee's is an institution in the plant world, specializing in indoor tropicals, many of them grafted from stock that's more than 100 years old. The most famous of these is a 108-year-old Ponderosa lemon tree that grows 5-pound lemons the size of footballs.
We weren't buying, just looking and drinking in the fragrant humidity in anticipation of spring. The jasmine was in full bloom, the tree camellias were showing a last burst of color, and the hibiscus shown here looked luscious enough to eat. We chatted with owner Byron Martin, third generation of the Logees to carry on the business, and noted he had not only a green thumb but a green forefinger, these he said, an occupational hazard from the dyes in the fertilizer he had been using.


Oh, and TomTom did just great, getting us from Providence to Danielson in about a half an hour. Next, we challenged him with a detour to East Hartford, but more on that later.

Snow fun on a Monday: Windblown XC

A road trip is fun when you take a couple of friends with you: TomTom the GPS navigator and Sirius satellite radio make the time fly when you're whizzing up Route 495 for what might be the last day of cross-country skiing at the closest real touring center to Rhode Island: Windblown.
Located in southern NH just across the Massachusetts border in the quaint town of New Ipswich, Windblown has 40Ks of hilly trails that traverse Barrett Mountain in the shadow of the great Monadnock.


When it has snow, as it does now, this ski area is as good as many areas much farther
north — better, if you include the fact that you can leave Providence at 9 a.m. (after picking up a latte from Seven Stars bakery), be on the slopes by 11:15, ski for a couple of hours, and be back home before it's even dark at 4 p.m.
Yesterday, Sunday, Windblown had more than 700 skiers, but today, with most people back at work, there might have been a dozen.

Northern extremes: White Mountains, NH

Believe it or not, there's a ton of snow just four hours north of Rhode Island in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
(Photo at right is from the top of the Speakeasy trail on Loon Mountain in Lincoln, NH.)
This season, the north country has had more snow than it's had in nearly 40 years, a total so far of nearly 100 inches. Could it be that rumors of global warming have been greatly exaggerated?


So don't let Rhode Island's bare ground fool you: If you like to ski, either cross country or alpine, you should be in New Hampshire to see scenes like this (of the 1785 Inn, at left) and the Mount Washington Valley ski touring center in Intervale, North Conway.
The next few days could be your last chance to ski till next year, because when it comes to New England's climate, the only thing that's certain is that it will CHANGE.