What I did on my summer vacation
Jul. 15th, 2008 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerWe headed for New England on July 3rd, and got back late on Saturday night. Ed's family lives in the Boston area, so the primary purpose for the trip was visiting relatives, but we also went up to the White Mountains to do a hut hike. The Appalachian Mountain Club maintains a series of mountain huts where you can hike in and stay overnight. The accomodations are both rustic and elaborate: during the summer and early fall, you can not only get a bed with three wool blankets (so you need to carry in sheets, but you can usually skip a sleeping bag), for an additional fee you can get dinner and breakfast, which is cooked by the "croo," the (mostly college-aged) staff of summer workers who maintain the huts, carry in the food, do the cooking, deliver evening educational programs, etc. The bathroom is equipped with clean running water so you can refill your water bottle, but the toilets are a composting outhouse. The bunk rooms are unlit and unheated. And there aren't any showers for the guests. So, not everyone's cup of vacation tea.
We went to Lonesome Lake Hut, which is the easiest one to hike to; it's less than two miles (mostly uphill) from the campground where you leave your car. We got to the trail later than we'd expected, and spent a lot of the hike up fretting that we'd miss dinner, since we weren't sure what time it was served. It took us a little under an hour and a half to get up to the hut, and we shouldn't have worried; dinner was a half hour after we arrived, and the croo would have fed us even if we'd been late. Our bunkroom had two bunk beds. Kiera climbed up to the top bunk (we didn't let her sleep there), looked down at me with wide-eyed bliss, and said, "This is the best vacation ever. Can we come here every year?"
Lonesome Lake is a tiny, beautiful lake with clear water and moderate temperatures. It's fabulous for swimming as long as you don't mind the leeches. Molly was un-bothered; I splashed and jumped away whenever I saw them coming towards me. The food was excellent, although Kiera liked it more than Molly did. We stayed at the hut for two nights; I think Ed had hoped to hike up to the top of Cannon Mountain (the hut is about halfway up) and the girls didn't go for it, but we swam and hiked and examined wildflowers and collected chipmunks. (Kiera collects chipmunks -- her word for it -- by pointing and saying "look, a chipmunk!" She collects convertibles the same way.)
The huts are along the Appalachian Trail, and thru-hikers can stop and do chores in exchange for dinner and a place to sleep. The south-to-north thru-hikers aren't in New Hampshire yet, but we met a couple of people going north to south. I overheard another girl who was staying with her family ask a thru-hiker, incredulously, "why can't you just get a car and drive to Georgia?"
After we came back down, we spent two more nights at a motel in the same area; we saw the Flume (Molly's favorite bit was a crawl-through cave formed by glacial boulders) and the Basin (it looks like this blogger went to some of the same places we did -- there are pictures of both the Basin and Lonesome Lake here) and we took the Cannon Mountain tramway (i.e. the really fancy gondola-type ski lift) up to the top and in all it was excellent.
Other miscellaneous observations:
* Ed's father lives near Plymouth. As a result, I have seen Plymouth Rock many, many times. It's really not worth seeing: it's just a rock, with 1620 carved on it, and a weird little Greek Temple sort of thing built over top. But if you're walking along the Plymouth harbor, and you're passing it, you stop and look, because it's THERE. Oh, and in the summer, there is an incredibly bored Park Service worker who stands next to it and periodically jumps down to retrieve a pinwheel or hat or water bottle dropped by accident. Anyway, this summer? it's under scaffolding. So if you were thinking of going to Plymouth to see the Rock, wait till next year.
* Kiera runs really fast. We discovered this at a playground we took them to. She wanted us to race her, and she beat me. Admittedly, I am not a very fast runner, but I have much longer legs. So then Ed raced her. Usually, when he races one of the girls, he gives the kid a head start, so he told Kiera he'd give her a count of seven. He counted like this: "one...two....three...fourfivesixseven" because he realized by four that if he didn't speed up, she was going to get to the fence before he finished counting. She refused to race with Molly, which is probably just as well for Molly's self-esteem, since Kiera would have beaten her handily.
We went to Lonesome Lake Hut, which is the easiest one to hike to; it's less than two miles (mostly uphill) from the campground where you leave your car. We got to the trail later than we'd expected, and spent a lot of the hike up fretting that we'd miss dinner, since we weren't sure what time it was served. It took us a little under an hour and a half to get up to the hut, and we shouldn't have worried; dinner was a half hour after we arrived, and the croo would have fed us even if we'd been late. Our bunkroom had two bunk beds. Kiera climbed up to the top bunk (we didn't let her sleep there), looked down at me with wide-eyed bliss, and said, "This is the best vacation ever. Can we come here every year?"
Lonesome Lake is a tiny, beautiful lake with clear water and moderate temperatures. It's fabulous for swimming as long as you don't mind the leeches. Molly was un-bothered; I splashed and jumped away whenever I saw them coming towards me. The food was excellent, although Kiera liked it more than Molly did. We stayed at the hut for two nights; I think Ed had hoped to hike up to the top of Cannon Mountain (the hut is about halfway up) and the girls didn't go for it, but we swam and hiked and examined wildflowers and collected chipmunks. (Kiera collects chipmunks -- her word for it -- by pointing and saying "look, a chipmunk!" She collects convertibles the same way.)
The huts are along the Appalachian Trail, and thru-hikers can stop and do chores in exchange for dinner and a place to sleep. The south-to-north thru-hikers aren't in New Hampshire yet, but we met a couple of people going north to south. I overheard another girl who was staying with her family ask a thru-hiker, incredulously, "why can't you just get a car and drive to Georgia?"
After we came back down, we spent two more nights at a motel in the same area; we saw the Flume (Molly's favorite bit was a crawl-through cave formed by glacial boulders) and the Basin (it looks like this blogger went to some of the same places we did -- there are pictures of both the Basin and Lonesome Lake here) and we took the Cannon Mountain tramway (i.e. the really fancy gondola-type ski lift) up to the top and in all it was excellent.
Other miscellaneous observations:
* Ed's father lives near Plymouth. As a result, I have seen Plymouth Rock many, many times. It's really not worth seeing: it's just a rock, with 1620 carved on it, and a weird little Greek Temple sort of thing built over top. But if you're walking along the Plymouth harbor, and you're passing it, you stop and look, because it's THERE. Oh, and in the summer, there is an incredibly bored Park Service worker who stands next to it and periodically jumps down to retrieve a pinwheel or hat or water bottle dropped by accident. Anyway, this summer? it's under scaffolding. So if you were thinking of going to Plymouth to see the Rock, wait till next year.
* Kiera runs really fast. We discovered this at a playground we took them to. She wanted us to race her, and she beat me. Admittedly, I am not a very fast runner, but I have much longer legs. So then Ed raced her. Usually, when he races one of the girls, he gives the kid a head start, so he told Kiera he'd give her a count of seven. He counted like this: "one...two....three...fourfivesixseven" because he realized by four that if he didn't speed up, she was going to get to the fence before he finished counting. She refused to race with Molly, which is probably just as well for Molly's self-esteem, since Kiera would have beaten her handily.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-15 07:28 am (UTC)I'm so glad you guys had a good time.
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Date: 2008-07-15 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 08:31 pm (UTC)I think we broke New England.