Hiking the White Mountains

I'm far behind on my blog so I'll try to catch up all at once today.  Two weeks ago we spent a week in New Hampshire seeing our good friends from Connecticut, Sheri and Bruno.  We spent the week at their new vacation home in the White Mountains near North Conway.  It is a gorgeous place with phenomenal views over a valley with several peaks in the background.  They have been working hard since they purchased it to remodel and refurbish the place as it was built in the 80's and needed some TLC.  As the area mixes both summer and winter activities their new place is fully winterized although, four wheel drive might be recommended to tackle the road leading to the house during the snow season.

We enjoyed an incredibly relaxing week catching up with them even though we took a couple of exhausting hikes (although nothing like our Adirondacks escapade at Mt. Dix in 2009).  A quick list of all the fun activities that we squeezed in: zip lining, trip to the top of Mt. Washington (although we opted for the car route to the top versus the hiking route), mini-golf (Bruno was the champion based on several key hole-in-ones), puzzle building, card games, touring Jackson, NH, along with multiple great hikes.  The weather cooperated with cool temperatures most of the week and only a day of serious rain which gave us a reason to stay indoors at least one day.

For the hikes our two longest involved hiking to South Moat/Middle Moat and doing Frankenstein Cliffs both of which provided excellent vistas along with some good challenging terrain.  Fortunately, Jo's knee held up for the whole week and seems to be recovering fine.  Sheri and Bruno are still working on several home projects which meant almost daily trips to the local hardware store which became a bit of a running joke among us.  The good news was it was a really cool hardware store with a wide assortment of both hardware and home items so there was never a dull moment browsing through the store.

During the week, we did a mix of cooking in and eating out.  Sheri and Bruno are excellent cooks and their grilled pizza was worth the trip to the mountains all by itself.  As this a relatively popular tourist area there are lots of great restaurants to choose from and the places we tried provided some tasty grub - especially the Mexican restaurant although that could have been the loaded margaritas.  Wait times could have been long but somehow almost every restaurant we went to found some way of seating us in half the time promised on checking in. 

The seven days flew by all too soon.  We enjoyed our week in New Hampshire but we are really miss not having Sheri and Bruno in the same area as us.  Maybe someday we can convince them to move to WI - we know they already love snow!