If you’ve gotten the feeling that this has been an awful summer weather-wise, you’re not just a cranky New Englander — and you’re not imagining things. The National Weather Service says we’ve had more blazing hot days and more gray, rainy days than we should.
“June was much warmer than normal. The average temperature was 6.3 degrees above normal,” said Alan Dunham, with the National Weather Service. “June was also dryer than normal. And then we switched over to July and pretty much flipped everything on its head. Right now, July has averaged 2.6 degrees below normal, and the rainfall is much above normal.”
Good beach days have been hard to come by.
Which is why, if you run an indoor gym or adventure park, right now you’re smiling.
“We’re doing about 40% better than on the dry, cooler days when kids tend to be outside a lot more, so it’s definitely had a positive impact on us in terms of business,” said Shelle Edge, the Ninja Program Coordinator at Strive Ninja Fitness in Franklin.
Edge said this summer has been the best of both worlds for the business. When it’s blazing hot, like it was in June, kids come in for the air conditioning. And when it’s cool and wet, like now, she said people come in to stay dry and get some exercise.
The gym has day programs for kids during the summer and encourages families to sign up early. But Edge said that when the weather’s going to be bad — whether it’s super hot or wet and rainy — they know they’ll have to add staff to handle the kids who drop in for the day.
“We definitely keep an eye on the weather,” she said. “Especially with a summer like this one… it’s gotten us into a pattern of just kind of like, ‘Okay, let’s look at next week because the heat is still here, or the rain is still here and the storms are still here’ and so we target those days with additional staff.”
“I do a rain dance every day,” joked Andy Powell, who runs the indoor trampoline park Urban Air Adventure Park in Bellingham. Powell said he doesn’t see much of a bump from the hot weather, but rain is a different story.
“They’ve been coming, and it’s been great,” Powell said about the past few weeks. “I am not unhappy when it rains.”
As COVID-19 restrictions were winding down, Powell said he and his partner didn’t know what to expect, making it hard to schedule days for the summer camps that usually spend time at his facility. And he was nervous.
“We need to build our summer business on groups and camps and these types of things,” he said. “And when it wasn’t going to happen, I was like, ‘Alright, it’s going to be a rough summer.’ But it’s rained a lot and that’s kept us going, kept us doing well, whereas I wasn’t necessarily expecting that to happen.”
If the weather forecast proves true, Urban Air may just keep doing well into August.
