New Hampshire with Hannah, January 17-18, 2010

On Martin Luther King Jr. day a few years ago, Noam and I were driving through a redwood forest near Mendocino, CA, listening to the "I have a dream speech" on the radio. Amazing. That speech gets me every time. MLK Jr.: the holiday, however, does not seem to have caught on quite as well, except for in the federal government and my office. Thank goodness Hannah went to work for the federal government, so now I know one other person who also has the day off. We spent the weekend in the Mount Monadnock area of New Hampshire. A nice rock wall and view of wintry New Hampshire:



We stayed at the Birchwood Inn in Temple. Despite the Birchwood being voted "Best British Experience, New Hampshire" by Yankee Magazine's editors, we actually picked it because Henry David Thoreau stayed there. Hannah and I went to Henry David Thoreau elementary school and have remained die-hard HDT fans. Our enthusiasm is undiminished, even after discovering that despite penning the awesome "In wilderness is the preservation of the world" line, HDT completely freaked upon experiencing real wilderness in Maine, and that during his "simple living" experiment at Walden his mother did his laundry. The Birchwood Inn:


It snowed like crazy Sunday night. I applaud the granite staters: by the time we got up at about 7, the roads had already been plowed and "gritted." (Thank goodness I had recently been to Ireland during a cold snap, so I could speak the "winter road conditions" British dialect.) Hannah and her car:

Hannah and I managed to catch the tail end of the "I have a dream speech" on the radio, just in time to hear "So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire." Woot!