Random Firings by Hank Farber

The first order of business in planning a weekend getaway was to convince my father or my uncle to lend us a big enough car. My Triumph TR3 and my
cousin's MGA just wouldn't cut it, great winter cars though they were (NOT). We had relatively understanding parents, so getting a substantial sized car was not so very hard. So we would take possession of either my father's 1965 Buick Electra 225 (the famous deuce-and-a-quarter) with the 425 cubic inch motor or my uncle's Dodge Dart wagon with the renowned slant-six of indeterminate (or at least forgotten) displacement. Next, we had to convince our parents to let us skip school on Friday. Since it was a six-hour drive to Waitsfield (the town in Sugarbush Valley), it made sense to ski for three days rather than two. Or at least that was the argument.

The defining feature of these weekends was that we had very little money. But we arranged the weekend so that we could ski the three-day weekend for about $30. Dollars went farther back then (5 times further. Hey, I'm an economist), but I am here to tell you that $30 is not a lot for a three- day ski weekend including food,lodging, gas, tolls, and ski lift tickets. And it did not help that the deuce-and-a-quarter got only about ten miles per gallon (and it only got that if we kept it under 85 or so). On one trip, my cousin received a speeding ticket in Connecticut (what a surprise). In order to pay for the ticket, he took a job washing dishes at the Sugarbush Inn Saturday night until the wee hours of the morning. Needless to say, this did not prevent him from skiing early AM Sunday.

These trips are where I first experienced driving near the limit. This was not on the New York State Thruway but on Route 4 in Vermont and especially on Route 100 in Vermont. Route 100 is one of the most beautiful roads in the Northeast, but it is not designed for high-speed driving in the snow. And snow it often did, and it was in the snow on Route 100 that I learned essential skills like how to steer into a skid and how to drive as if I had an egg between my foot and the gas and brake pedals in slippery conditions. All of this is automatic to me now and makes me a much safer driver in the snow, even in New Jersey. While I explain these skills to my children in an effort to teach them, the key is practice and they (like all new drivers) do not have these skills yet. They need to be automatic and instinctive. The two oldest have been to chapter driving schools at Lime Rock and Summit Point, and this
has helped. Highly recommended.

This snow experience may also be why I am happy to see rain at drivers schools. I am comparatively faster in the rain than in the dry. This was an especially important factor when I drove my 2002 at the track. There is no greater kick than passing a high horsepower car in a fairly stock quarter-century old 2002tii.

Back to Vermont. Let me explain how we managed on such a limited budget. There were two keys: lodging and food. As for lodging, we stayed at a place called the Bagatelle, where for one dollar apiece we could roll out our sleeping bags in the "bag loft". The bag loft was a single large room on the top floor with room for about 60 sleeping bags and a large shower/bathroom. We happily stayed here, but it must be said that not much sleeping went on with all the commotion and coming-and-going. I can't imagine being remotely interested in such accommodations now. Such are the effects of age and a steady income. As for food, we cooked breakfast in the trunk of the car on a Coleman stove. Eggs were the order of the day. Lunch was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread eaten on the mountain and washed down with water (free and unbottled in those days). We splurged for dinner
one night by actually eating either spaghetti or hamburgers at one of the local casual places. The other night we would fire up the Coleman and cook similar things ourselves.

There were several difficulties in this method of cooking outdoors in Vermont in the winter. First, when it is 20 below zero, Coleman stoves are somewhat hard to fire up. Lots of pumping and so on with very cold hands. Second, things like eggs freeze between the shell and the pan in very cold weather. And they certainly do not stay warm for long after they are cooked. Third, it was sometimes hard to sneak the dirty dishes into the bathroom at the Bagatelle for cleanup.

While not related to cooking, the cold weather also made it imperative to make sure that the car's cooling system had adequate antifreeze, as we learned the hard way once staring at the "freeze-plug" that had just blown out of the side of the slant-six. No long-run harm though.

After skiing a full day on Sunday, we would blast back home, collapse into bed, and rise in the morning with time to spare to study Taylor series expansions (yeah, right.) before Mr. Elowitz made his wry observations on Monday morning. By the way, our preferred ski area was Mad River Glen. A very hairy mountain with the coldest single chair lift I have ever ridden.