New Hampshire Trip Day 1
My wife says she had the breakfast of champions this morning. What you ask? Whiskey. Straight up.
You’ve got to understand, my wife hates flying. With a passion. If it wasn’t for the fact that we saved a good deal of money by flying to New Hampshire over driving she wouldn’t get on the airplane. I brought my trusty flask for her to nurse on and she took a few hits before take off. The flight itself was nothing to write home about. The almost negligible turbulence we hit on climbout out of Cleveland sent her through the roof. My son just looked across the aisle at me and giggled like it was a roller coaster.
As I said before, we are thinking of moving to New Hampshire. Today we started our trip. We found someone to housesit for us and hopped a plane today. We arrived in Manchester to a gray cold day. There is a snow storm approaching and you could feel it in the air. We had a bit of an issue with our rental car in that they didn’t have a reservation for us for today. They thought we were arriving tomorrow. The frazzled girl tried to pawn off a compact on me but there was no way I was going to be driving all over New England for a week in a teeny little Ford Focus. After a bit of fussing I got them to upgrade us from that to a full-sized SUV for about $5/day. The price difference is normally about $30/day. Now we’re cruising in a 4×4 Trailblazer which is even better than what we originally wanted.
We pulled out of the airport with no plans in mind. The road to Portsmouth looked good so we took it. We ended up getting off that road after a couple miles and took backroads through Southern New Hampshire. The terrain is beautiful. And expensive. As we found out by grabbing flyers from in front of houses that were for sale. Being under an hour from Boston makes this prime living territory for people who work down that way. We stopped for a bit in the town of Exeter. It was a cute little town with a bunch of shops to browse. You can tell it relies a lot on tourism, as do many towns around here.
Driving around we noticed that a lot of houses have their construction dates on placards out front. It’s still hard to get over seeing dates like 1823 and 1757 on buildings. Back home our house is 30 years old and it’s considered and ‘older’ house. Here, that’s new construction. 100 years old is just getting broken in. Of course, their houses are much smaller here too. 1,500 sq. ft. is huge in a lot of areas.
We made it in to Portsmouth after dark and found a hotel with wireless access. I wanted this so I could keep up with job applications I’ve placed up here.
They say it’s supposed to snow after midnight. The desk clerk says the weatherman is predicting ‘not much accumilation’ which means about 2-4 inches. My son can’t wait.