Looks like readership is up a little. Thanks to both of you. More old new news in the wake of my trip. A wonderful store called the Twin Mountain Trading Post.
Twin Mountain Trading Post
Back in September when I ran in the Reach the Beach 200 mile relay race, one of our first stops was at a pizza/sub shop attached to an outdoors store. In the store, there was a single bathroom, which several people lined up to use. I needed to put my contact lenses in, but didn’t want to hold up the line, so I found a decorate mirror hanging on the wall and put my contacts in in front of that, setting my glasses on the ice cream freezer in front of it.
Several weeks later, after I had returned home, my eyes became irritated. Knowing that I was near or beyond the 30 days of recommended wear for my contact lenses, I found my glasses case and then removed and discarded the contact lenses. Then I opened the glasses case and discovered that it was empty. Fortunately, my neighbors were willing to drive me down to the eye doctor, where I picked up a spare pair of lenses. I eventually traced back my activities over the course of the previous weeks and realized that I must have left them behind at the outdoors store.
Having played almost no role in navigating for the entire relay race, I had very little sense of where the outdoors store might be. My internet searches did not turn it up, for whatever reason. Fortunately, one of my relay race teammates was able to hunt down the name of the pizza place we stopped (I had searched for delis, not pizza). I called the pizza place and asked if they were attached to an outdoors store, which seems like a crank call set up along the lines of “is your refrigerator running?” The pizza person seemed a little confused, but gave me the phone number to the store.
That store was the Twin Mountain Trading Post, which is now my favorite brick-and-mortar trading post in the whole world (nobody can compete with the Sierra Trading Post, the online super-incredible-store.). I called up the Twin Mountain Trading Post and asked about my glasses. The woman laughed and skeptically said she’d check, but mentioned that I was the 8th person that week to call asking about lost glasses. Nonetheless, she had me describe them and found them among the store’s fairly sizeable collection of lost-and-found glasses. Then the store mailed them back to me.
The Twin Mountain Trading Post is on my good list. My very good list. Right up there with SoCo Creamery. It’s great to see a company interested in simply doing the right thing, regardless of any business interest. Good press on this blog and word-of-mouth endorsement around my home in Michigan are not going to do anything for this little store. But I am grateful that they went to the trouble of returning my glasses. I found and returned a lost cell phone a couple weeks later to pay forward the good deed.
