How Route 44 Businesses Fared in the Dark

Route 44 in Avon seemed a ghost town on Sunday and Monday, only appropriate heading into Halloween, but select businesses did not let the blackout stop them from opening up shop prior to regaining power Monday night.

Big Y was the only business with a generator and was open, though not selling perishable or refrigerated items. , but no power and no vacancies. was not open, but to some regular customers.

in Old Avon Village, next to , lost power at 4:45 p.m. Saturday, so store owner Paul Wheeler closed at 5:30 p.m., had the day off Sunday due to the state law against selling liquor on Sundays and came back in Monday at 1:30. He remained open until it got dark. He was the only store open Monday in Old Avon Village during the power outage and with the plaza closed it was hard for people to see the liquor store was open.

Nonetheless, he had customers.

“Today, I had a lot of customers,” Wheeler said on Halloween. “It was great.”

The beer refrigerators were open because it was colder in the store. What was the most popular purchase?

“Mostly wine, red wine. A little beer, a little vodka, but mostly wine,” Wheeler said.

But there was little whining going on Monday at Eastern Mountain Sports Monday as the store remained open in the dark as it had been a good portion of Sunday. Staff wore headlights and shined them as they wrote receipts out by hand. The door was open to let in whatever light there was. Hand warmers were on display on a table in front of the store for purchase, and camp stoves, fuel, headlights, flashlights, batteries and other emergency necessities were available at the front of the store. Warm clothing, mittens and hats were also in stock.

“We actually have had a stellar day. We’ve had a lot of folks in almost exclusively for fuel and stoves and lighting,” store manager Mike Lloyd, of Avon, said. “We’re an outdoor store. We’d be disrespecting the community if we weren’t open.”

In a way, the storm was good for business, he said, but they had abbreviated hours and closed when the sun went down.

Lloyd can empathize with his customers because he is without power on Chevas Road, where he cleared nearly 25 downed trees from the roadway.

“I chain-sawed my way out of my road to get to work yesterday,” Lloyd said Monday. “A gentleman was on a dialasis machine yesterday and came out of his house, so we said we’d better get him to the hospital.”

His neighbor wasn’t the only one anxious about getting to a hospital.

West Simsbury resident Katia Czaja, who came into EMS with her family Monday after a trip to the grocery store, said that her neighbor was due to go into labor on Halloween and went to stay with her mom.

“The roads are so bad. When she goes into labor, it’s going to be a long drive to get to anything,” Czaja said.

Czaja was in her outside watching her kids build a snowman when the power went out.

“Trees were just coming down everywhere,” Czaja said. “One of the kids had a race on Friday and then we had a lacrosse tournament on Saturday, so by the time the storm hit we had nothing. We didn’t realize how big it was going to be.”

The Czajas went to the Simsbury shelter to take showers.

“But we’re campers, so we have a camp stove and we’ve been bringing coffee to our neighbors and we have sleeping bags,” Czaja said. “So we’ve been just camping out.”

In the meantime, to pass the time, Czaja said she and her husband have been reading a Swedish book called Moominland Midwinter aloud to her kids. The story is about a troll waking up in the middle of winter, never having seen snow before.

And having snow in October is something most of us have not seen either.