July 2011: USA Part 2: New Hampshire

This is Part 2 of the USA vacation blog.

We’re in New Hampshire now.

One thing I didn’t mention was that during our stay in New Hampshire, most afternoons and some evenings were spent at the association’s pool complex, which featured two outdoor pools, an outdoor kiddie pool, an outdoor hot tub, two indoor pools, and three indoor hot tubs. There are some pictures from one swim trip, but those should be taken as representative of our every evening there. (They do not, alas, include the girls encountering Santa Claus, who apparently summers in Lincoln, NH.)

The day after the girls got their haircuts (and everyone else had gone to Lost River) we made a mass family trip to Loon Mountain itself. Trine opted out of this trip, believing perhaps rightly that a gondola trip up a mountain would not be a pleasurable experience for someone with both claustro- and acrophobia (the latter being fear of heights). I consider myself blessed by her absence, because it meant I got to ride up with Hannah and the girls, and ride down with Sophie and the girls. Here’s the trip up.

I always thought (and still think) Molli Malou and Maddie have a very Scandinavian look (go figure), but in these pictures and those from Munich last year, they actually look prototypically Swiss or German to me. I mean, they look like poster girls for Ricola or Toblerone or something. Don’t they?

At the summit there was a tall wooden watchtower, about four or five stories tall, that commanded a beautiful view of the White Mountains around us.

Loon Lake was also clearly visible: the lake is about two thousand feet above the valley floor.

The original owner of the condo we were visiting — the father of the girl from whom we’d rented it — had died some years earlier, and his ashes had been scattered about the open-air church of Loon Mountain. We visited the “church” — which was really just a small ampitheater set into the side of the mountain — and Maddie was apparently touched by the spirit: she broke out into an insane dance on the altar, and her sister and cousins joined right in. The video of this is classic, but the pictures aren’t bad either.

Here’s a better perspective of the “church” in its entirety:

Twisting down off the summit was a trail that led down to the Loon Mountain Caves.

Finally it was time to descend.

Back at the house, Maddie tries to cheer Sophie up at one point.

A job well done, because not long afterwards we were on our way to the pool.

On the way, the irrepressible Tedster found himself a date!

…and hot tubs.

When we got back to the condo and dried off, I remembered that our mountain passes were good for as much mountain travel as we wanted to squeeze into the day. I persuaded the girls to join me for one last trip up and down the mountain, and they were excited to join me. We had cut the timing very close, so we didn’t even get to step out of the gondola on the summit, and when we asked at the base to go back up another time we were quite unambiguously told to go home.

Back at the condo, Maddie resumed work on her choreography while the grown-ups played celebrity into the wee hours.

The next morning we drove up through mountain roads to Storyland, long promised to the girls as the highlight of the trip.

I had lined up for a ride on those antique cars with Maddie upon our entrance, while the others had run off for more adventurous fare. Maddie and I waited twenty minutes or longer for the little four-minute cruise, and by the time we caught up with everyone else Molli Malou came running to me and explained breathlessly, “Daddy! I went on the one ride two times, and the other ride two times, and I’m not afraid, and they’re so fun, and I want to do them again with you!”

So much for her (admittedly already fading) fear of fast roller coasters!

And look… she was actually tall enough at last to ride by herself on many of the rides!

(The whole trip seemed to make her feel bigger and older, to such a degree that when we were finally getting into our own car upon our return to Denmark, she squirmed uncomfortably in her seat and informed us that it was no longer a good seat for her because she had simply grown so much that she was too big for it.)

As you could probably tell, we all got thoroughly soaked on that one ride: fortunately there was a little high-speed drying cabin near the exit, and it had a fascinating effect on Molli Malou’s dress.

(“Look!” she had squealed, “I look like a wedding cake!”)

We rode the Pumpkin Carriage to Cinderalla’s castle and got some face-time with the princess herself, an experience Molli Malou found enthralling and Maddie found vaguely disturbing.

After the palace, swan boat rides!

Er… okay, I guess I have no good pictures of the actual swan boats.

This little automated puppet show had a bunch of empty benches in front of it. Trine and I were alone with Maddie at the time and approached to see what they did. It turned out they sang every little kid song Maddie knows: Itsy-Bitsy spider, If You’re Happy and You Know It, BINGO, Twinkle Twinkle, and so on. Maddie was enthralled.

I mean the girl was enthralled!

Meanwhile, Molli Malou had been spinning around with the Lees on a teacup ride that she insisted on doing again with me. To her horror, the metal safety bar didn’t click down correctly on us before the ride started and she seemed sure the ride would spin so wildly it would spin us off into outer space or something.

Maddie opted for more sedate rides.

We sat through the most obnoxiously pedagogical little semi-automatonic theatre revue I have ever had the misfortune of enduring, but the girls actually seemed to like it.

Finally I wandered off with Maddie to the part of the park designed for wee ones, and she ambled into the ball pit and refused to come out for about half an hour. (Her sister would eventually join her. She was actually too tall for the ball pit, but the indulgent attendant said, “Well, it’ll probably be the last summer she can or will want to do this kind of thing, so let her at it.”)

Molli Malou was weirdly skeptical of the talking tree.

We closed that day with a nice dinner out in Lincoln, after which we got the only full group shot of the week. (Shirley Temples all the way around!)

And that was the end of our trip to New Hampshire! The next morning we packed up and drove back down, first to Chelmsford to gather up some stuff we’d left there, and then all the way down to Connecticut. We let the girls run amok at the Byam plaground to burn off some steam during our very brief stop in Chelmsford.