International Stump

Anyone unfamiliar with the game stump must not know me at all, and has been living a less fulfilled life. You can learn a bit from this Wikipedia page although our rules slightly differ in a much more awesome way.

As soon as we landed in London I was missing stump, but as the English cut down all their trees hundreds of years ago I knew acquiring an adequate stump was a lost cause. I did keep my eyes peeled on every drive we took, hoping, but it wasn't gonna happen.

I brought my hammer from work on this trip thinking I might be luckier in Europe, and when we passed a house in Belgium that had recently cut down and bucked up a couple trees I knew that was my chance. We went back later and swiped the perfect little stump to put in the back seat for the rest of our trip.

Now I figured once we found a stump nails would be the easy part. Granted we passed through Germany before I really started looking. In Italy I assumed if I kept my eyes peeled I'd notice some kind of building supply store on our drives but after 2 days I gave up. I looked online and found out that Italians aren't big on DIY home improvement. They strongly believe in the importance of individual trades and when something needs fixing they call Tony from down the street. I did however find the word for ironmonger (hardware store in Canada), which was 'ferramenta' and a google search of that came up with a few results.

The first mission was to a small town near our camp ground but my address was an apartment building and no ferramenta in sight. I now know not to fully trust google maps in tiny Italian villages.

The next day we went to Milan and there appeared to be a few there. We walked in to one only 5 minutes from the Duomo in the very heart of Milan that was a tiny cluttered shop with a random assortment of home improvement stuff ranging from screws to towels to cutlery. Luckily they understood my request for 'chiodi' and we went to a bin of assorted nails. I pointed out the big ones and said I wanted 50 and this poor kid dumped them on the ground and started sorting. He got to 35 and that was enough. They ended up being a ridiculous €8,50 but after all that trouble I was happy to pay.

We had mentioned our game to the German couple we met and they said it sounded familiar. Looking at the Wikipedia page I saw a link to a game called Hammerschlagen that's similar and a couple hundred years old.

We haven't gotten to play with anyone else yet, but tossing a hammer in the air has caught a few eyes, so it's only a matter of time.

-Justin