We’re sitting here at 11:08 pm and listening to Oliver, the bird about 5 RV’s down, talking. Sometimes he gives a wolf whistle, sometimes a very definite ‘oh,oh’, sometimes just some loud calls. We love listening to Oliver and laugh every time we hear him. But, then we don’t live across the street from him. Maybe at 11:08 pm he could be taken in.
One of the things we wanted to do was to walk the boardwalk in Hampton Beach on the New Hamshire shore. There’s not much shore in New Hampshire but the state makes the most of it. It was a beautiful sunny, warm day and everyone was out. The water in New Hampshire is frigid, even in the summer. I remember walking into the water up to my ankles and my feet were numb within a minute. It’s not really a swimming beach but a sunning and wading beach.
We found this old picture of Hampton Beach in 1915. Note all the dark suits and long dresses even out on the beach.
One of our favorite treats (as if every treat isn’t a favorite) is fried dough. There are bundles of flavors from cinnamon to confectioners sugar to peanut butter and we even saw a Boston Creme Fried dough in Boston. A woman ordered, the guy in back turned around to his refrigerator, scooped something light yellow out of a huge dish, squirted chocolate on it and handed it to her. We asked: Boston Creme Fried Dough.
We are traditionalists - we order the confectioners sugar on ours. And, that’s what we did today.
My brother-in-law has done several triathlons. Well, we’ve found a new one for him.
We often went to the beach when we lived out here but we chose a rockier beach because there were fewer people on it. Doesn’t mean that it wasn’t as much fun. There was sand, which doesn’t show up in this picture since I cropped it off but it’s there, believe me, a bit of sand. Soft to sit on but there are lots of little marbles to walk on to get to the water.
To get to the beach we have to take Frying Pan Lane.
But that’s par for the course in New England where the roads have quaint names. My favorite has always been Cat Mousam Road in Maine. Speaking of roads: our house number in New Hampshire was 5 Quarry Road. We lived in the Granite State on Quarry Road. Now, there are clues here. Quarry, Granite - hmmm. I shouldn’t have been shocked when our builder told us that it was solid rock where we wanted to put the house and he needed to blast it away. He drilled holes into the rock for the dynamite, covered these holes and the rock with huge entwined metal blankers and blasted away. Whoosh, ‘we have liftoff’ - those blankets sailed 20’ high into the air and we had a basement.
Note where we put the rocks that came out. We lined the driveway, we used them around the house. We had rocks to spare.
But we loved the house. In New England you’ve got 2 choices for heat: oil or electricity. We chose electricity but when our first bill came in at $85 a month (this was back in 1978) we blanched and decided that we could live using only 2 rooms - the study and the bedroom - and our heat bill came down. (Must have been getting in practice for our motorhome.) But, why did we build such a big house when we used only 2 rooms? Thus the decision to put in a wood burning stove - pretty popular at the time. Remember those days? Great alternative and it kept us warm twice: once when we chopped it all up and stacked it and once when we used it to heat the house. We did this for 5 or 6 years before we sold. We did notice when we saw the house that the wood-burning stove had been replaced by oil pipes.
One other memory: our first interest rate the mortgage on this house was somewhere north of 12%. Oh, my.
Ah, yes, the ‘good’ old days.
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