Planning our family vacation a month or so ago, I posted a bleg, asking for advice about where a family might go and what it might see in northern New England. To the nearly 100 readers who replied, two notes:
a) My wife and I took your suggestions seriously enough to plan ten days of our two-week vacation around them (reserving the remaining four days for my Dartmouth College reunion, which begins this coming Thursday).
b) The death of a certain former actor disrupted our plans, leading us, after landing last Tuesday in Boston, to drive, not north to the Maine coast, the first stop we had planned, but south to Washington, where we where found ourselves remaining for the better part of a week. You have our thanks, in other words, for all your help—but those ten days of vacation have now been collapsed into just two.
What’s left of our vacation? We spent today on the Maine coast, where, dropping by Kennebunkport, we spent a delightful couple of hours with an old boss of mine and his wife. (My former boss just turned 80, and, to get around his summer place, he has taken to using a Segway, on which he happily showed off for the Robinson children, riding backwards for a couple of hundred feet while pointing out the sights—and this just 48 hours after celebrating his birthday with a parachute jump). Tomorrow we’ll be in the New Hampshire mountains, staying at the Eagle Mountain House, a vast, rambling, nineteenth-century hotel, with—vital for the kids—a tennis court, a pool, and a driving range. Thursday we’ll hike Mt. Moosilauke. (That’s the plan, anyway. I’m 20 years older than I was the last time I climbed the mountain, and this time around I’ll be carrying a two-year-old in a pack on my back. We shall see.) And on Thursday evening we’ll roll into Hanover for my 25th Dartmouth reunion, just as originally planned.
More notes from the road as we roll along.