The Mountains or the Shore? Let's Do Both!

Time for a recap of our New England bike route.  As you can see from the map, we came up the west side of Vermont, then cut across the state to Lake Willoughby.  After our wonderful week there, described in our last post, it was time to make for the shore.  We came through this way in 1995 and explored many of the classic passes of northern New England:  Smuggler's Notch, Kinsman's Notch, the Kankamagus Highway, Crawford Notch and Evans Notch.  Our tandem friends Janet and Steve had already explored the first of these, and decided to do Kinsman's and "The Kank" on the way to Maine.  We opted to take a different route through a part of northern New Hampshire we hadn't seen, allowing us to revisit Evans Notch, our favorite.  Our separate routes reconverged in Fryeburg Maine.

Our route was less dramatic, but not without its charm.  The roads were typically narrow and a bit beat-up from hard winters in Vermont, and better in New Hampshire where this sign made us hopeful.  We could have upped the odds of seeing a moose by taking a $50 Moose Viewing Trip (advertised as having a 97% success rate), but saved the money and no moose came along to reward us for our parsimoniousness.  We did however stumble into starkly beautiful Stark, NH.  It is named for Revolutionary General John Stark, but the name fit the architecture of its little library, church, covered bridge and old hotel, and also the way of life 150 years ago, when the gravestones (complete with foot markers showing the length of the coffins) were set up for Phoebe, who died at the age of 21, and her little Andrew, who followed his mother 8 days later at the age of 1 1/2.

These New Englanders are renowned for their practicality and frugality.  Why waste a perfectly good roof on a covered bridge, only covering the bridge?  With the harsh winters they get up here, we're sure it makes perfectly good sense to put the town's mailboxes under that roof as well.

As noted above, we took this route to enjoy Evans Notch a second time.  Unlike its famous neighbors Franconia, Crawford and Pinkham Notches, routes that were heavily travelled even before Henry Ford started tinkering with gasoline engines, Evans Notch was unexplored until the CCC built a road through here in the '30s.  It hasn't changed in 80 years.  It is so quiet, only 2 cars passed us in the 15 miles up and over the main part of the pass!  It didn't have the bright yellows with touches of red and orange that adorned the forest 15 years ago when we were here in late September, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

However what has changed, we're sad to report, is our own engines.  15 years ago we started 15 miles further from the pass, and we have no recollection of walking any part of the climb.  While we did have maybe 6-8 pounds less baggage on that trip, that doesn't completely explain our decision to walk about 1/2 mile of the steepest part of the climb this time around.  We'll chalk it up to "stretching our legs" and say it was good for us, a healthy decision, OK? 

Our plans to meet up with Steve and Janet worked just fine, and we enjoyed a nice rest day in Fryeburg in typical fashion, by being active doing something different than cycling.  Once again it was canoeing, this time on the Saco River.  We came through this area two years ago and had planned to do two days of canoeing.  Surprise, 2007 had the second-wettest July in their history, and the river was so high it was closed to canoeing as too dangerous.  This time it was just right.  We're hoping to get a photo of us and our canoe from Steve and Janet to put in here once they get things sorted out -- alas they're working people and are already back at their jobs in Seattle! -- but for now we'll settle for a photo we took of them the next day, joining us for the ride south to southern Maine past some of the lakes and lakeside cabins (think On Golden Pond, for example) that the area is famous for.

At South Berwick, Maine we said our farewells and headed in to Portsmouth NH, as Steve and Janet had plans to meet up with their daughter and future son-in-law the next day for a 3-day family bike ride to Boston.  We all had been nervously following the news of Hurricane Earl, but it turned out to be a Perfect Storm -- as in perfectly well-behaved!  It stayed well offshore so the winds never got above 25 mph, it was far enough away that the rain wasn't all that heavy, and -- best of all -- it came through between midnight and 4 am so we woke up to a beautiful day.  We spent an extra day in Portsmouth to wander through the old streets admiring the well-kept and ancient homes there -- these first two photos are of houses built in the the 1700s through early 1800's.

We also wandered past the Moffatt-Ladd House, where William Whipple lived in the 1770's and planted a tree in the side yard to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence when he arrived back from being one of the signers in Philadelphia.  And, of course, we couldn't help exploring an old cemetary or two.

Portsmouth is on the south side of the Piscataqua River, and we stopped to admire the view across the river to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, which is actually in Kittery, Maine.  We were walking back from the river when Louise caught a glimpse of a familiar tandem bike gliding by.  We yelled but Steve and Janet didn't notice us as they were a block away by this time, but a quick cell phone call "caught" them a few blocks away and we had time for a quick hello to Cari and Jack, whom we had not seen in three years, and yet another good-bye to Steve and Janet.

Since Portsmouth is a few miles back from the open ocean, it wasn't until the next day that we got our first glimpse of the Atlantic, complete with the Isle of Shoals islands in the distance, and an attractive salt marsh across the road behind the barrier beach the road took. 

The extended Sisson family had continued on to Hampton NH for the night while we stayed in Portsmouth, but that next day we were riding through Newburyport, Mass. when who do we see waiting at a traffic light to our left but Steve, Janet, Cari and Jack!  Since we were all headed to the Clam Box Restaurant in Ipswich, we rode together for a few miles and enjoyed one last lunch together before our third good-bye, which turned out to be the final one.  By the way, do you think we ordered enough fried clams?

After one more night in Beverly MA we reached Salem, home of course of the infamous witch trials, of the House of the Seven Gables (pictured here), and of the Salem-to-Boston Ferry.  We were now ready to begin the watery phase of our trip -- ten ferry rides over the next fourteen days, bringing us to Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and other places we'll tell you about in our next blog entry.  We'll end with a few images from the first two rides, both on fast ferries.  The first was a short hop to Boston, with views of the rocky shore and a distant Boston across some of the islands in Boston Harbor before the close-in view of Beantown from the water, with a 19th-century fort on the left for added color:

Then, after a short ride along the downtown waterfront from Long Wharf to the World Trade Center, we boarded our second catamaran fast ferry for an only slightly longer ride out to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod.  We'll close with this view of the P'town harbor dominated by the Pilgrim Tower erected in 1910 to commemorate the first landing of the Pilgrims there -- Plymouth was where they headed a few months later for its more abundant water, timber and arable land.  Cape Cod, here we come!

Lake Willoughby

Lake Willoughby has a special place in Jeff's affections, since this is where he and his family vacationed for three weeks every summer from when he was ten until he was in college and busy summers making money to pay for it.  His folks continued to go there and bring back home movies, however, so it was well ingrained in the Davis blood.

We planned this year's trip to have two week-long breaks on the way to Washington DC, and this was the second one.  Once again we had a few days to ourselves, then were joined by others, this time our tandem friends Steve and Janet Sisson from Seattle.

The house we found online turned out to be even better than in the photos on our computer screen, a log cabin with two bedrooms and a loft we never used, plus a screened porch looking down to Lake Willoughby that we turned into a sort of Lake Willoughby Book Club -- although we're all reading different books.

Lake Willoughby is famous for the Willoughby Gap, the dramatic break between Mt. Pisgah to the left and Mt. Hor to the right, each about 1,500' higher than the lake.  The part of the lake between the two mountains gets deeper than 300' so the lake is always a rather brisk swim, though we hear it's good for fishing.

Before Steve and Janet arrived we spent a truly lazy day just recovering from our ride there, which was our first day since we left Toledo two months ago that we got drenched, all 32 miles of the way.  It was an interesting business walking around the supermarket 8 miles before Willoughby, leaving a trail of drips as we went up and down the aisles to pick up a few essentials to get us through the first day and a half.

After that day and a half it was back to the food store to pick up more food for us and the Sissons.  It was fun riding there with just empty panniers and an empty rack trunk, but the ride back, which involved a 450' climb, was a good workout as we once again had to haul about 40-50 pounds of milk, juice, canned and bottled goods, without crushing the loaf of bread, the eggs or the tomatoes.

Our last day alone we took a walk along the west side of the Lake past this charming former one-room schoolhouse and onto an old logging road that started fairly promisingly but eventually got a bit too thick for easy hiking.

 

We've been through here in the third week of September, when the Fall color starts in earnest.  This time of course it was still late August, so no real color except for an occasional tree or part of a tree trying to be the first on the block to turn. 

None of Jeff's trips to Willoughby was complete without a hike up Mt. Pisgah.  The problem for us, however, was that the trail started at the other end of the lake, more than six miles away.  Resourceful travellers that we are, we stuck out our thumbs on the highway and sure enough a pickup truck stopped and loaded the four of us into the back.  We started the hike by a beaver pond a few hundred yards from the semi-continental divide where raindrops decide whether to roll north to Lake Willoughby and thence to the St. Lawrence River, or south into the Passumpsic and Connecticut Rivers down to Long Island Sound.  A short ways further and we passed some impressive boulders, possibly parts of Mt. Pisgah that rolled downhill or possibly glacial erratics, chunks of rock that the glacier dropped here 10,000 years ago.

The hike proved interesting.  It seemed really steep the first time Jeff did it at age ten, then it got less steep each year after that.  Then it got a bit steeper again when we biked through here in 1995 and climbed it together for the first time.  By golly, it's gotten as steep again as that first time fifty-plus years ago since then!  Who says mountains don't change!

What hadn't changed were the views, and the Pisgah hike has lots of them.  First up was Pulpit Rock, when you're on a bully pulpit of granite about a thousand feet higher than Lake Willoughby.

Next up was Summit Rock, where Steve is looking off to Burke Mountain, elevation 3,267', about fifteen  miles south of us.

Beyond the summit the trail continues northward, eventually re-descending to the Lake, but not before passing three more lookouts that are about 1500 feet above the water.

On the descent we apparently passed an enchanted toad, who turned Jeff's hiking companions into dance competitors.  Jeff controlled the camera at this point, so there's no embarassing evidence of what it did to him.

Well, there was one more thing to check off the bucket list for a perfect lake stay, and that was a canoe trip.  Our cabin was 200 yards from the lake, but the canoe had wheels, and pretty quickly we were waterborne.   And what would a paddle around a lake be without a whole bunch of oohing and ahing at all the beautiful lake homes.  There were quite a few to pick from for our favorite, but you'll probably agree that it's pretty hard to beat a place like "The Birches" for North Woods beauty.

Alas, the week was finally up.  We set off to the north and east as the Sissons headed south and then east to a rendezvous three days from now in Fryeburg Maine.  We'll then canoe the Saco River for a day, followed by two days of riding together to southern Maine.  We'll finally say goodbye then as they meet up with their daughter and future son-in-law for a ride to Boston, while we take a slightly different route to Beantown.  We'll explain it all when we blog next.