Pug’s Place

Wednesday afternoon (the 20th) I left work early to head to the airport. Unfortunately, I was going there to negotiate with the Delta ticket counter people as I had been told minutes earlier that my outbound flight in two hours had been canceled. The negotiations were fruitless as there was no better solution than the one Delta had already rescheduled for me: leave Ft. Walton Beach 2 hours later and arrive in Manchester at 1:30 AM. So I drove home, having no desire to return to work for the day, and waited for 6 o’clock to arrive. By the time it did I was at the airport and my outbound flight had been pushed back another hour to 7 PM, but luckily I had had two hours of layover in Cincinnati already, so I was not going to be stranded. I wasn’t, and I got in at just past 1:15 AM local time on Thursday morning with Katie standing there waiting for me.

She drove us back to her place while we listened to Gaelic Storm mp3s I brought on an mp3 CD (Gaelic Storm being a very lively Irish band). The roads there were dead at 2 AM, and we were back at her place in the deep darkness around at around 2:30. Crash -> Sleep.

Thursday after both of us slept in we toured Peterborough (est. 1760, named for Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough), the town in which Katie works. This involved a little shopping (such as for birthday cake ingredients), a museum visit (the Mariposa Museum), and general wandering through the downtown area.
I surprised Katie then with our travel plans for the weekend while casually tossing her her passport: a visit to Mt. Washington and a day in Montréal. We capped that evening with tickets to see the local professional theatre, the Peterborough Players, present Inherit the Wind, a drama loosely based on the Scopes-Monkey Trial. The play was well performed, presented in a quaintly converted old barn and an excellent way to spend a summer evening! I’ll leave it to Katie to critique the play and the performance.

So Friday we hopped in Katie’s Scion xB and headed north to Franconia Notch State Park and Mount Cannon. Our stopping at Mt. Cannon was entirely spur-of-the moment. We were traveling through the State Park on our way to Mount Washington when we read a bland brown park sign stating “Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway Next Exit.” Intrigued, we stopped and decided to indeed ride to the top of Cannon. It was a pretty but short ride up the bulk of the mountain, and then Katie and I picked a steep trail and bounded our way up to the summit’s observation tower. Our trail up to the tower was the “short” trail and, while steep, was only perhaps a 5 minute walk. Nevertheless the 4180 ft altitude made us happy we weren’t exerting any more, we weak-lunged sea-level folks.

We spent a fair amount of time on the summit tower looking at the gorgeous views over the state of New Hampshire and into Maine and Vermont. While up there we also watched a small plane make two trips towing gliders up near the mountain and releasing them to soar around the White Mountains (where we were) and the Presidential Range (where Mount Washington is). It was peaceful, crisp and intoxicating, but as in so many other situations, our stomachs got the best of us and, cursing ourselves for not bringing our sandwiches up with us, we hiked the long, not steep way back down to the tram station (taking more pictures), returned to the car and ate lunch. Sated once more, we bid Cannon farewell and continued into the Presidential Range and toward the base station of Mount Washington’s cog railway.

Mount Washington has a rare sort of train which navigates its steep walls: a train with a locomotive on the wrong end which maintains traction and locomotion through a cog and slotted track setup. In other words, a cog railway. This train was built in the latter half of the 19th century and is still a coal-burning engine today, carrying tourists up ridiculous grades to the 6,300 ft summit. Unfortunately for us, the cog railway has a steep price tag associated with tickets. At $50 a person we weren’t fighting for the right to ride, but we went to the cog railway depot because we wanted to see Mount Washington more than its neighbors in the Presidential Range (due entirely to its prominence in Julian May’s Intervention and Galactic Milieu books!) and this seemed a more obvious place to find a trail up its slopes than anywhere else around it. Once there we toured the cog railway’s museum, watched a train begin its trip up the side of the mountain and wandered straight onto a trail which terminates at the summit. Being good little adventure seekers, we struck out on that trail for a good while.

Katie proved that she is much more sure-footed than I, as she could move across wet and loose rocks with much more alacrity than I could manage. There’s nothing quite like having weird conversation and apples by a waterfall on the side of a mountain. Some pictures later, we turned around since skies were darkening (waaayyy too early) and we still had a long way to go to reach Montréal that evening.

Back in the car we struck off north to the Quebec border where we were appropriately harassed by a French Canadian customs agent who seemed to think Katie and I were smuggling in firearms and tasers (Luckily, we had already sold all of the firearms to rogue Shakers). Beset by torrential rain and heavy traffic, the trip west toward Montréal was not a fun drive, but Katie did and excellent job of getting us to the city. Someone was watching out for us though since we reached a Montréal which had no rain and good lighting conditions. Unfortunately it was also a Montréal with lots of traffic. Katie did an excellent job of navigating our trip across the St. Lawrence and downtown, even when our chosen street was blocked off for the setup of a festival and we had to make a large circle (thank you, one way streets!). We parked underneath the Complexe Desjardins in which the Hyatt is located [map], adjacent to the Place de Arts. We checked in and immediately set out to wander the city streets and find ourselves a late dinner. We picked Guido’s and Angelina’s [map], an informal Italian restaurant next to a small cathedral ,which did an admirable job of catering to our needs. After dinner and a little more wandering we returned to the hotel to…

Watch Futurama and Star Trek VI en français! We are such geeks, I love it! In actuality, listening to French Klingons and especially a French Scotty was more than a little disturbing, so we refrained from watching the whole movie.

We spent most of the next morning wandering the downtown, poking into the odd shop here and there. We did a fair amount of art appreciating (mostly impressive Inuit stoneworking), picture taking and general out-on-the-town doings: wandering the harbor, watching street performers, attempting to buy cold drinks… As happened the day before, we were waylaid early in the afternoon by hunger and decided to use that as a cue to return to the car and drive back to New Hampshire.

We had a much prettier view of Quebec on our trip away from the city than the one the day before: clear skies revealed quaint farm houses, gently rolling plains and an unbelievably high number of passing cars whose passengers craned their necks into all positions to get better looks at Katie’s Scion. The vehicle doesn’t appear to be on sale in the smaller areas of New England, and there certainly are not many on the roads! (Katie has seen two in the past two months). They’re apparently still quite uncommon in Quebec, too. In more than four out of five passing cars with passengers, the passengers all turned around and stared. Katie got quite a kick out of this, but not so much as our experience with the American customs agent at the border:

(we drive to the booth)
Katie: Hello.
Customs Agent: (staring)…What kind of car is this?
Katie: (making sure to mention a large car company) A Toyota Scion.
Customs Agent: (thinking it must be a hybrid) So… what kind of gas milage does it get?
Katie: Nothing special, around 30, 31.
Customs Agent: Is that all? Not one of those…
Katie: Nope, nothing special.
Customs Agent: You know…. it’s kinda… ugly.
Katie: (laughing) It is! It’s my box.
Customs Agent: You should have it in yellow, then you would really stand out.
Katie: I stand out well already!
Customs Agent:Well, have you been in Canada long?
Katie: Just over the weekend.
Customs Agent: Well, welcome back…
(drive away, laughing like maniacs)

We took a different route back to Peterborough and instead followed the Connecticut River down the Vermont-New Hampshire border (on the Vermont side). Hills, river, lakes, pretty countryside everywhere (Too bad it would be a death trap while covered with ice!). Since Katie drove, I had the benefit of soaking in all of the beautiful views, and soak them in I did. By the time we reached Brattleboro, Vermont, we were ready for dinner so we rustled up a table downtown at a New Mexico-inspired restaurant; In other words, this was Tex-Mex in NM-style. Katie broke down and had a New England-ish meal (her first one so far) of salmon drizzled with maple syrup, and I, not to be dissuaded from keeping in touch with my inexplicable and possibly counterfeit Mexican heritage, had an enchilada. Then, under cover of darkness, we crossed the state line and proceeded back to Katie’s place, hampered severely by a traffic accident that for a long time halted traffic on a twisty country highway. But eventually we got back, Katie exhausted.

On Sunday another instance of sleeping in occurred, halted only by the opening of presents! We simply hung around Katie’s place all day on Sunday, first baking Quick After-Battle Triple Chocolate (Birthday) Cake, then making dinner. The cake baking was a hoot! First off, this cake recipe comes from Patricia Wrede’s novel Book of Enchantments, and the instructions involve actions such as mixing the batter in the helm of one of your comrades. Second off, this cake uses lots of chocolate (chocolate milk, chocolate chips and cocoa). Third off, we didn’t have a mixer so we used a food processor (which worked surprisingly well, except that the batter didn’t have as much air in it as one would optimally want, so the cake was somewhat flat). Fourth off, we decided to attempt to make frosting without having a clue about how to go about it.

While I know now several methods of making frosting (both with and without heat), at the time we were simply the blind leading the blind and, after many small trials, our saucepan contained not frosting but chocolate rock candy! Always resourceful we crushed the rock candy into a coarse powder and shook it on the top of the cake as a sweet topping anyway. The end result was a lot of sugar! SUGAR! Dinner was one of Katie’s favorites, a kind of southwestern ’sloppy joe’. Ask her about it sometime, it’s a pretty good dish!

Monday was the departure day, and while I didn’t leave until afternoon, the spectre of departure always skulked nearby. Still, good conversation, speedy packing and good food all occurred before the drive to Manchester and the fare-thee-wells. Delta, reliably, got me back here two hours late. Figures.

An excellent trip with lots of adventure and lots of miles put on Katie’s new car!