I am so far behind on blogging! The events referred to in this post actually occurred last month, but I want to remember them and so I will tell you about them, even though they are already starting to feel like ancient history.
The company I work for doesn’t allow us to carry over vacation days from year to year. I goofed up this year and I found myself with three soon-to-expire days. My boss said “use ’em or lose ’em,” so I used them. Faithful Reader and I made some hasty plans, then loaded up the car and headed north for a quickie vacation.
I call it “five-state fun” because we started in Rhode Island, traveled through Massachusetts, stayed in New Hampshire, took a side trip to Vermont, and stopped briefly in Maine on the way back. Our primary destination was Lake Sunapee. After a wonderful vacation on Keuka Lake, I felt a yearning to find a vacation destination a little closer to home. Sunapee is big enough to show on the map, but not so big as to be completely overrun with tourists. At least it didn’t seem overrun to me. It was quiet and beautiful.
We stayed two nights at a place called the Twin Doors, our first American B&B. The building was once a duplex and when the owners remodeled it they left the two doors in place, hence the name. They did a nice job with the renovations. The rooms were attractive, clean, and well-furnished. They served us a scrummy breakfast in the morning, as well as snacks and coffee in the afternoon and evening. The level of service was so good as to be almost annoying. We don’t live nearly so well at home.
While in the Sunapee area, we had dinner at a restaurant on the harbor, walked along the sides of the lake to check out the cottages, and we also went to a place called the Fells. The Fells is an old estate which is now run as a sort of museum. The house itself was closed that day, but we enjoyed the nature trail that runs through the woods and along the lake. They also have a great rock garden.
There is a frog pond in the garden. I spent some time photographing the frogs (time which I later commemorated by buying a little wicker box with a wooden frog on top). I tried to get the perfect frog picture, but once I got home and looked at the photos, the best turned out to be one of Faithful Reader’s shots. Here it is.
The whole Sunapee area seemed pleasant and we dreamed for days of buying our own lakeside cottage (that is, until we crazily put a deposit on an ordinary house located nowhere near a beautiful lake).
We also took a side trip to the Long Trail brewery in Vermont, which is located right next to a river. We had an excellent lunch while sitting outside on the deck, listening to the river and sampling Long Trail’s many wonderful beers. After that we checked out the Native American flute store just down the road. The guy who makes the flutes is very friendly and he makes good flutes, but he also wants good money for them, and we are (alas) too cheap. We returned to the B&B with exactly 1 case of beer and 0 flutes.
We toyed with the idea of staying one extra night, but when we arose on our last day there, the clouds were looming. First, we decided to head home but then the weather got better, so we decided to check out Lake Winnipesaukee, but then we decided to head for Mt. Washington. At the end of the Kancamagus Highway, about halfway to Mt. Washington, we realized it was getting awfully late, thanks in part to the several stops we made, including a hike to the Sabbaday Falls.
We thought it was probably too late to see the mountain that day, so we changed our plans yet again. I decided I could live without Mt. Washington if I could cross a state off my Bucket List, and there was Maine just a tiny distance away, a state I had never been to before.
My parents went to college in Maine and lived there, I believe, until just before I was born. That made Maine special to me in some sort of vague way, and yet I had never been there. Faithful Reader picked Kittery as our destination. We went, we shopped, we ate.
And then we went home to discover that the cats, once again, had not missed us a bit.