Weekend at Steele Hill Resort and Ridiculous Skyporn

Visiting Kevin so often, I always saw signs for Steele Hill Resort on the way to his house. I had no idea what such a place actually was, and also had no idea that the rumored timeshare my friend Dan had was actually there. I finally got the invite, and Rich, Holly, Josh and I, with the addition of Hilton (visiting from San Diego) headed up for a weekend of golf, swimming, camping, and ridiculous skies. 

I've been really enjoying this summer, and by doing so, have failed to practice the art of being a blogger. I always have my phone ready for instagrams, but I have noticed how bad I've been at taking pictures solely for the blog- something I was very good at last year. I think this is a good thing, because I'm living in the moment more and caring less about "oh this would be good for the blog," but at the same time, damn, I really need to take pictures of stuff other than skies. I'm remembering how to be a blogger. But it's harder this year.  

There were some ridiculous skies that weekend though- like Pixar clouds. 

After hanging out at the campsite for a bit and sweating a lot, I pushed to play golf. Dan had said there was a 9 hole par 3 course, and I wanted to get out there and kill it. 

The day started off great- Myers used Dan's clubs, and literally on his first swing, the head of his driver went about 40 feet farther than the ball. It just snapped right off to all of our hilarity. The day was off to a good start.

Here's Dan's beautiful swing as he tried to murder the ball:

And here's Dan playing the shortest hole I've ever seen. It was literally like 40 yards at best. 

This picture would lead you to believe that this was a short course, but I can assure you that it is not. Sure, there are some obvious par 3s, but also some of the longest and most ridiculous I've ever seen. We'd later find out that they changed 2 of them to par 4s, but I think they need to change at least 3 more to be accurate. 

We had a blast though- Dan played barefoot, and Hilton one upped him by playing barefoot with no shirt. Sunburn city!

There's a guy on vacation.

It was a hot, hot trip, but we had a lot of laughs and a few random good shots peppered in with a lot of awful ones. Dan and Myers would either hit it really far in completely the wrong direction or about 30 feet. Hilton would hit it 3 to 4 times too long on every shot, and I was about as consistently inconsistent as usual. 

Here's us looking defeated on the way off the course. Really, we just wanted to get in a damn pool.

It was BEAAAUUUUTIFUL out there though. I had no idea the Steele Hill Resort was on such a hill- I didn't realize Sanbornton had any real elevation. Looking over lake Winnisquam and to the Belknaps with just absolutely ridiculous clouds was quite a treat. 

I've hiked those mountains!

We took turns with pools, jumping in the smaller outdoor one to the inner very hot and extremely chlorined indoor pool, to the hot tub, to even the sauna at one point. I had never sat in a sauna and let it cook me before, and it was pretty serious. Hilton and I did 20 minutes and could wave our arms and cover the wall with splattered sweat in that time. Just the right thing to be doing when I had had barely any water all day, had been outside sweating for 2 hours, and had drank alcohol. I wonder why I had a headache? 

The pools were great though, and we hit the level of stupidity where I even jumped in the kiddie pool just to say I had been in them all. 

The best part was that a wedding was taking place behind us- possibly 2 in a row by how long it/they took. I hope they enjoyed a bunch of shirtless fat guys running around behind them yelling. 

We then travelled across the resort to jump in another pool, which we had to ourselves. B was thrown, good times were had. We headed back to the campsite to exchange some gifts (Josh, Dan, Myers and I all had birthdays around this weekend), eat some burgers and hot dogs, drink some dranks, eat some chips, etc. 

We decided to then hit up the indoor pool for the adult swim. 

When we got there, the sky started doing some craaazy things. 

In one direction was this weird tiny strip of rainbow, completely alone and very strong. Moving my head 40 degrees, there were weird light lines in the sky. This is super HDRed, but take out a lot of color, and this was still pretty accurate:

no idea what was causing those lines.

Here's another one of the weird rainbow (the Red Eye of Sauron) from higher up:

Never seen the sky do this. Insane.

And here's another super HDRed shot looking back at the building that housed the giant pool. I'm not sure I've ever seen a sky so busy and doing so many different things at once. It was incredible.

yea, it wasn't quite that color.

Kate told us that we could climb up to the top tower to get even crazier views, so while others swam, Rich and I, the true iphoneographers of the group, headed up. It was about 128982323 degrees up there, but we got to watch the sky change several more times, before finally turning completely evil red, 

and eventually exploding into pouring rain. It was amazing. 

We then swam in a dome building with windows everywhere, watching the storm. We found out that there was in fact, no adult swim, and we'd have to hang out in the pool with a bunch of punk kids. 

We had a blast though, going down a surprisingly scary water slide, going in the hut tubs, MMA fighting, etc. It was awesome. This made 4 different pools in one day. I will forever prefer lakes, but this was nice. 

Ray and Chanda showed up and after further exhausting ourselves (Hilton went down the slide at least 40 times), we eventually headed back to our wet camp. 

Dan cooked more dogs and burgers, I ate way too many chips, drank some BEAHS GUY, and we sat around the fire for hours listening to Rich's wind-up radio and talking about awesome stuff like wrestling. 

It truly felt like summer.

I of course went to bed last and had to get up 2 hours later to pee, but other than that, I slept about as good as I always do in a tent (not very well), and morning came way too quickly. 

We ate pop tarts for breakfast (since Rich brought like 40), and after sitting on our butts staring at each other for at least 2 hours, we finally got the show on the road and headed back to pool #3. 

When we got there, nearly everyone sat down and read for awhile. I didn't bring a book, so Hilton and I played 4 holes of golf, then went swimming again. It was another beautiful day.

we played 3 balls each on the short hole.

We then went back to camp and packed everything up, then headed towards a grill (they have them sporadically placed everywhere) and had a BBQ of the remaining food. Dan finally ate his cake, which was hilarious. Recently, while cleaning, Josh found a picture of Dan and Blade, a guy they've all been making fun of for years, together in high school. Josh got the picture printed on a cake as an amazing prank gift for Dan. Here he is with the best piece- Blade's face:

he pretended to hate it, but he was soooooo happy

When I was invited, I wasn't sure what a weekend on a resort where we had access to a bunch of things but were camping out would look like. It turned out to be exactly as described- full use of everything, just staying in a tent in a field instead of inside. It was awesome though. The place had everything, right down to 4 Xboxes mounted on the walls with giant TVs. I hope to go back, and this time, I've promised to do every activity in 1 day for the ultimate blog entry on the resort. Whether it be this summer or next, I will swim in every pool, sit in every hot tub, play golf, shoot baskets, fish, play video games, etc. EVERYTHING. And it will rule. Can't wait.

currently listening to: CKY- "Carver City"