Bridges & Mountains

My nostalgic post-before-last about our supposed final trip to Vermont wasn’t quite true.  After leaving Lake George, we had a cross-Vermont jaunt on our way to New Hampshire because, to paraphrase the locals, you can’t from theah to heah without going through theah.

We drove past Killington Mountain, where the Noels used to do their skiing while the Kaesers were at Stratton.  Killington was where I experienced one of my earliest you’re-getting-old moments – I taught Pete and Abby how to ski there, then one day they zoomed off and I couldn’t keep up with them any more.

Woodstock is right up there with Manchester (and Stowe, which is farther north) in terms of Vermont towns with scenery, history and a cool vibe.  Happily, it also has a Main Street wide enough to drive The Big T through without any angst.

We also passed a willpower test by eating lunch at the excellent Long Trail Pub & Brewery without the rig driver partaking in any refreshments (although a six-pack of Long Trail’s excellent Harvest Maple Brown found its way into the fridge for later use).

Leaving Woodstock, we saw our first covered bridge of the trip.  More would follow.  

Soon after leaving Woodstock, we crossed into New Hampshire, our 25th state of the trip.  En route to our campsite, we had a biiiiiig moment – a moose sighting!  S/he was in a grove of trees near the highway, calmly foraging for something more interesting to eat than leaves while a dozen camera-toting tourists snapped away frenetically.  We overheard one woman say she’d lived in the area for 26 years and this was only the second moose she’d ever seen.

We stayed in Conway, NH (North Conway, actually – there are five villages in the town), which is north of Lake Winnipesaukee and at the south edge of the White Mountains, home of big, bad Mount Washington.

One morning, we visited some of the covered bridges in the Conway area (one of which, weirdly, has a gift shopping in the middle of it that smells like the worst Yankee Candle shop you ever walked into).

We then stumbled onto a hidden jewel, Echo Lake State Park, featuring the spectacular Cathedral Ledge.

We took the dogs on a nice little hike to Waterville Valley and Sabbaday Falls, back near where we’d spotted the moose the previous day (who had moved on, thus sparing everyone the spectacle of Roxy trying to make friends with a moose).

The one rainy day we had in Conway, we ate lunch at a brewpub that has an all-time no-smoking sign.

Thursday, it cleared up and we dragged ourselves away from the Blase Davis – Kavanaugh hearing long enough to climb Mount Washington, the tallest peak east of the Mississippi.

Well, we didn’t literally climb it.  There’s a train that goes to the top.  I dare anyone to find a more interesting train ride – three miles, 3500 feet of elevation, with an average grade of 25% that includes the 37% grade called Jacob’s Ladder.  It was the first railway in the world to use a “cog” system – a rack-and-pinion located in the middle of the track.  The trains all have a throwback look and feel, but they’ve been retro-fitted with more modern technology (although our locomotive had a steam engine, meaning we had to stop halfway up to reload with water).

The railway has been operating since 1869.  It’s always been about tourism.  When built, it was the alternative to a dirt road for getting to the hotel at the top of Mount Washington (a popular destination for the well-heeled to escape the summer heat – President Ulysses Grant was an early patron).  The road is still there (now paved) but the hotel is not – there’s now a weather observatory and a visitors center at the summit.

And views.  Oh, the views!  On a clear day (which we were lucky enough to get – the peak is fog-bound 300 days per year, one of the reasons why the mountain proclaims itself as having “The Worst Weather in the World”), you can see five states in a 100-mile panorama.

The trip back down was more intense than the ascent.  The guy who was our happy-talk narrator on the way up was our all-business brakeman on the way down.  Everyone thought his priorities were fine.

We timed our trip perfectly, relative to the historic events in Washington (DC, not Mount) that day.  Our trip to the summit was during the lunch break of the Blasey Ford-Kavanaugh hearing, and we got to listen to most of it on the radio while driving to and from the mountain.  Mount Washington was more uplifting…in more ways than one.