New Hampshire

It was a long 9 hour drive from Toms River to Shelburne NH.  Last year I bounced all over the country, but this year I’ve been trying to stay in one general area (the North East) and make shorter trips.  So far I’ve done pretty well, but this was a long, uneventful day.  The trip is broken up by the all too frequent fuel stops.  Now that my truck is broken in, my gas mileage has gone from about 9 MPG to almost 12 MPG when pulling.  The biggest jump is of course when I’m not pulling.  That went from 10 to almost 19 on a really good day. Now that makes me very happy!!  The diesel prices up here are all over the place.  In NH, they must have lower gas taxes because it’s pretty cheap at 3.75ish.  Most other places have been closer to 4.25 and I’ve even paid more.  I find that when I’m driving down the highway, I like to fill up when my truck gets to ½ a tank.  Notice I said ‘like to’ not ‘I do’.  Sometimes I don’t like the prices, or to be honest, I just don’t feel like stopping when it seems I just got back on the road, so I’ll keep driving.  Where this is an issue is when I don’t see another diesel station.  This presents a real problem because now I have to take a chance and leave the highway and hope the station is big enough for me.  One of these days I’ve going to really regret it when I run out of gas on the side of the road!   

This trip was no different.  I waited too long to stop and now I was getting closer and closer to empty.  I saw a diesel sign and took the exit.  This was one of those exits where what you’re looking for isn’t right there, you have to drive a ways.  So I began following the little sign and all too soon found myself in the middle of the cutest little town.  The operative word here is little, not cute.  Have I mentioned before that I’m 13 ft tall and 53 ft long?  First problem I saw was a low bridge warning.  Of course there was no place to turn around, so I took the first turn I saw and wound up in the town square.  Oh how the town folk were staring!  Everywhere I looked were low bridge warnings and I thought this time I’ve really done it.  I found the one street that had no bridge, but in order for me to make the turn, cars at the intersection had to back up.  I caused a bit of a traffic jam, but eventually I got back to the highway and wiped the sweat off my brow. And I was still running low on fuel.  That’s about the time that I realized my RV GPS has a feature that points out RV friendly gas stations.  Lucky for me, there was one at the next exit so that day was not the day I ran out of gas!  The reason I never noticed it before is that I only use the GPS when I’m pulling.  The rest of the time, I use the one in my truck.   I hate the RV one and only use it because it routes me around low bridges and tunnels that prohibit propane. Of course, that only works when I follow it, not when I detour and go out on my own. Now that I know it has that feature, I’ll certainly use it more often.  

I got to the campground and pulled into a spot next to a camper that had a German Sheppard chained outside.  She was about a year old and from the looks of the area, had been there a while.  The ground was all tore up where her chain went.  I felt sorry for her and went to make friends. She seemed friendly enough, a very sweet dog that even knew commands like sit and down.  I also noticed that she didn’t have any water.  It looked like she used her bowls for toys and had dumped the water out.  More on her later…

I spent a week hiking in the area.  It was pretty rocky, but not as bad as Vermont.  By about the 3^rd hike, I realized I had done something serious to my right knee.  My left knee has long had problems, there is no ACL, the meniscus is gone on one side, and torn on the other.  I also have really bad arthritis.   I had surgery to rebuild the ACL using the Patella, but it’s never been the same.  Since I’ve always had problems, I compensate by putting more strain on the right knee and less on the left one.  Well, I‘m finally at the point where all the stress has damaged the right one.  By the way, this one also has no ACL and arthritis.  I’m hoping I’ve just pulled a tendon or something.  It only hurts when I use it for things like walking, going up or down hills or stairs or getting in my truck.  Or when I sit with it bent.  Other than that of course, no problem! 

I took a day trip to nearby Franconia Notch State Park.  I had to go check out ‘The Old Man in the Mountain’.  The Profile was a natural rock formation that was formed an estimated 200 million years ago. It hovered 1,200 feet above Profile Lake. The Old Man was made of five separate granite ledges arranged horizontally to form a man’s profile. From chin to forehead, the Profile measured about 40 feet and was 25 feet wide. On May 3, 2003, the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed.  When I was stationed in Alpena Michigan, my co-worker was from New Hampshire.  I clearly remember the day it crashed, he came to work quite despondent.    I guess it caused quite a stir from the public.  Instead of trying to rebuild it, they decided to put these sticks up, that if you stand a certain distance away, it sort of looks like a profile.  This is how the park describes it: Visitors will first walk through two standing stones which create a gateway to the memorial area and are designed to honor the caretakers of the Old Man. They will then encounter a series of five huge stones which, viewed from a raised viewing platform, merge into one form that recreates the outline of the famous profile. Finally, in a newly landscaped park at the water's edge, steel "profilers" will allow visitors to line up a series of irregular edges and thereby "see" the outline of the famous profile up on the cliff where the Old Man once stood.  Oddly enough, if you stood just right behind these steel profilers, you could actually see the profile.   

I also saw the Basin which is a large pothole in the Pemigewasset River, 30 feet in diameter and 15 feet deep.  It had its beginning some 25,000 years ago as the Ice Age came to a close. Water flowing from the melting glacier that filled Franconia Notch eroded the solid granite bedrock. During the thousands of years that followed sand and stones were whirled around by the force of the river causing a boring action that left the sidewalls smooth. The rock formation seen in the stream bed at the outlet has been known for generations as "The Old Man's Foot". 

For lunch I decided to take the tram to the 4,200 foot summit of Cannon Mountain.  The views were spectacular, you could see the all the distant valleys and mountains.  While up there, I noticed lots of hiking trails, but I didn’t have time to check them out.  I wish I had more time in the area, but there was just so much to see.   

It was getting late in the day, but I had one last stop to make.  I saved the best for last, the Flume Gorge.  The Flume is a natural gorge extending 800 feet at the base of Mount Liberty. The walls of Conway granite rise to a height of 70 to 90 feet and are 12 to 20 feet apart.  You walk along a narrow wooden walkway and the views are spectacular.  These wooden walkways were amazing, they followed the contour of the gorge, going up and down and around huge boulders.  It was surprisingly long too.  There were so many beautiful spots; I took tons of pictures.  Looking at them later, they do all kinda look the same.  Since it was late in the day, there were fewer people around, which was good.  I don’t like people in my pictures, and I sometimes have to wait a long time to get a good shot.  Here, there were several people doing the same thing, so we all kinda grouped together so as not to be in each other’s shot.  There was even a covered bridge which was a really nice picture. 

My friend Gretchen came to visit on the weekend in her little Road trek RV.  It’s basically a van type RV with a double bed in the back, a toilet, refrigerator and kitchen in the middle and the drivers and passenger seats up front.  Well, when Gretchen arrived, she was in a bit of a panic  because when she turned on her AC, tiny pieces of paper towel blew out all 4 of her vents.  Seems a busy little mouse had taken up residence.  Oh, and she is afraid of mice.  I got in there and pulled all the paper out and inspected the rest of the van, all the cabinets and crooks and crannies.  I found more little nests, but no mouse poop or evidence of a current resident.  Just for safe measure, we locked my cat Sammie in for the day while we went exploring.  Let me just say, Sammie is an inside cat who never missed a meal in her life.  I wasn’t sure she would even bother to get up from her nap if she saw a mouse, but what could it hurt? 

We took a day trip to the Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caves in Woodstock.  It was kind of like a maze, where you had to wind your way along a catwalk and thru different caves, all of them small.  Most you had to get on your hand and knees to get through.  Lucky for us, there were walk arounds so you could skip the caves all together.  But you couldn’t avoid stairs, there were thousands of them!  Up and down and around we went.  Sometimes you only had 3-4 steps, but often it was more like 20-30.  Not so good on the old knees, but we made it by just going slowly.  Like Flume Gorge, there were many picturesque spots and we had a great day.   

When we got home, we found no mice bodies and Sammie went right to her food bowl when I brought her home, so I told Gretchen I was pretty confident her mouse was gone.  Well, about 30 min after she went to bed, she was banging on my door.  She heard the mouse and no way was she going to sleep there!  My floor was just fine for her. 

By now I had been at this park for a week.  I noticed the people next door had 3 kids who were in and out of the trailer all day long.  Not one time did any of them even look in the direction of the dog tied up outside.  Yet every time she saw them, she was overjoyed in the way only a dog can be.  She jumped up and ran to the end of her chain and pawed at the air, her whole body wiggling with happiness.  She would run back and forth for as long as she could see them, but again, they never even looked in her direction.  The husband would come out every morning and feed her and give her water on his way to work.  She would promptly pick up the water bowl and carry it around.  She had no toys or bones to play with an no one paid her any attention.  I felt SOOO sorry for her.  No matter how hot it was, no one gave her water.  When it rained, they left her outside in the mud.  I rarely saw the woman, she apparently sat inside all day long.  When the husband came home, he would feed her then he too would ignore her.  It was truly heartbreaking to watch her be so mistreated.  I told Gretchen that I had an overwhelming desire to just take her when I left at the end of the week.  I overheard the couple on night talking about her.  The woman was mad that the dog went to the bathroom inside, so she just left her outside.  She was also mad that the dog jumped on the trailer and got mud on the walls.  They did occasionally bring her inside, but they would keep her caged in a kennel not even big enough for her to stand up in.  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and went to talk to the lady.  She said she didn’t even like the dog, she had bitten a kid and she was just unmanageable.  I spent 3 days trying to convince the woman that the dog was unmanageable because they never worked with her.  If they would just walk her, spend time with her, burn off some of her energy, she would be a great dog.  And I stressed the importance of giving her water at lease several times a day if she continued tipping her bowl over.  I went to the store and bought her toys and a bowl that was designed to stay up right.  I told the lady that I would show her how to train the dog to walk on the leash without pulling, but the lady didn’t want to go walk at all. 

The whole time I was trying to convince her to give me the dog.  I couldn’t find a rescue agency in the area who could take her and when I talked to the humane society they said her treatment didn’t rise to the level of abuse.  According to the camp ground owners, the police had been called twice but they couldn’t do anything either because it didn’t rise to the level of abuse.   

When I left, I went over one last time to try to convince her to give me the dog.  Her solution?  We’re going to take the dog to obedience training! Really!  That’s what you think the dog needs???  It made me sick to leave her and in the end, the only reason I didn’t go back one night and just take her is because of Brutus.  One snap of her jaws and he’s be dead.  The lady said she was aggressive towards other dogs.  I did leave her with a bunch of literature on chained dogs and the value of exercising them. 

Next stop Connecticut and Rhode Island.

 

Link to pictures: https://plus.google.com/photos/118205599704530902363/albums/5921264174534764721?authkey=CNfr6f-XzKGhgAE