New Hampshire is closed for Thanksgiving

Hi again y'all.....Andy (Bill) here. I thought I'd get on and write something about our last few weeks. Jen will probably add some photos to this entry at a later date, as I don't have access to them where I currently am.

Thanksgiving... otherwise known as Turkey Day! Gobble Gobble!

This was our first one in the USA. Due to the fact that Greg and Pauline are coming to see us next week, and we'd probably celebrate then, we decided to burn up some vacation time, and head up north.

The itinerary was Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. No real plan, just drive, visit some places, check out the scenery and then stay the night. Then repeat.

Monday

We decided not to leave over the weekend before Thanksgiving, as the weather was terrible, so we headed off just after peak hour on the Monday morning. Most of the driving was on the interstate, as there wasn't really much we wanted to see until we crossed the border into Vermont.

We stopped fro luch at a place called Brattleboro, a nice little town, the the brewery that we wanted to stop and have lunch at was closed until 5pm. From here we headed up through the centre of Vermont. We stopped for afternoon tea at the Long Trail brewery (OK is there a pattern starting here), where Lexie head-butted me in the nose. OUCH! It was 4pm and dark by the time we left there so we decided to head straigh for the next attraction Queechee Gorge so we could do that first thing tomorrow morning. On our way through to Queechee we went through the most gorgous town called woodstock -no not that one- it was all lit up for Christmas too and looked great, definitily have to see that one in the daylight. We booked into our hotel and jumped straight in the pool. Lexie was in heaven, after a day of being cooped up in the car she now had a whole room to explore and a pool to splas around in. Heaven for a one year old. But really she was a great Kid all day, but we decide not to push our luck and just ordered a pizza for dinner and took it back to our room.

OK Jen here again, I'll continue the story since this is as far as Bill got.

Tuesday: Tuesday morning we headed just down the road to Queechee Gorge. Of course the visitors center and everything wasn't open, but we did find the path to the gorge so we followed that. I was a bit dissapointed in that you never did get a good view of the gorge, maybe if we had walked down to the bottom it would have been better, but in all the snow (yes we woke up to a good inch of snow on the ground this morning) we decided it wasn't worth it so we just walked up to the dam instead. Lexie wasn't overly impressed with walking in the snow but once she got up on daddy's shoulders she was fine!

We headed out of town and onto route 100 which we were going to follow all the way up, but since it kept snowing on us intermittently we decided to just stick with the route 12 as that gave us the option of jumping onto the main road in it got too bad. It didn't though, was just a fantastic drive through cute little towns all covered in snow. Loved it. We did however see our first snow related accident, some idiot took a corner too fast and rolled his ute. I think he was a bit embarressed as he was a bit surly when we asked if he needed a hand.

In the afternoon we headed towards Stow stopping in at a winery, a Cider Mill and an ice cream factory (Ben and Jerry's) of course taste testing at all places, before heading into Burlington for the night. Since we had a late lunch in Stow (Lexie really needs to learn to keep her pants on in the bar, but thats another story) we decided on the Skinny Pancake for dinner, a little Newtowny type place where lexie had great fun throwing rocks on the patrons sitting below us. naughty girl!

Wednesday: we headed from Vermont into New Hampshire with a quick stop in Montplier (Vermont's capitol) for a look at the state house.

This is where we encountered problems. It seems that New Hampshire closes down in October. And I mean everything, all the signs are taken down at the tourist attractions, the board walks were taken up at the gorges etc, all the rest stop were barricaded...obviously they don't want visitors in winter. So we obliged and headed straigh across the White mountains to spend the night in Conway.

Thursday - Thanksgiving.

We decided we had to get out of New Hampshire and headed straight for Maine. First stop Portland. This turned out to be a great town with a realy cute old port area. Of course evrything was closed for Thanksgiving but we expected that today. We headed up the coast looking for a place for lunch.....hmmmmm....not much luck. we found a couple of places where they were offering a full Turkey dinner but didn't quite feel like it at lunch so ended up witha hotdog and a sub at the service station. What more could you want. Heading back up the coast we saw tonnes of gorgous little towns, with all the Christmas decorations up they look really nice. but we decided to press on to Bar Harbour so we could do Arcadia national park tomorrow. Only one place in town open for dinner so went there and had a good lobster dinner. Yummm, not sure the couple at the table next to us were too thrilled to have Lexie intruding on their romatic dinner though. Oh well too bad.

Friday : We headed into Arcadia. Unfortunately as there was bad weather forcast for the afternoon they had closed all the roads in the park. So instead we just followed the main round around the island ending up back at Bar Harbour for lunch at the Subway. The island was quite pretty but not quite as rugged as I had expected.

We then got back on the main freeway and headed back towards Massachusetts, stopping back in at Portland for the night.

Saturday we headed home via Manchester and Nashua. Had a fantastic Hungarian Goulash at a little Hungarian Pastry shop in Manchester. Well worth the stop.

Sunday Monday Tuesday and Wednesday were spent relaxing and readying the house for the arrival of Grandma and Grandpa.