In New Hampshire Again, Sept 3, 2009

We are in Hancock, New Hampshire again.
The leaves are just beginning to change. Around swamps and brooks there are lower story trees. such as grey birches and willows, with lots of red leaves Although there is a lot of color about the bogs and swamps, the setting is usually not conducive to a good photograph. The picture beside this writing, however, gives you an idea of what we see.

Along the roads and at the edges of fields the maples are starting to turn with trees exhibiting scarlet, yellow, and a really beautiful burnt orange (yellowish-red) color. We have delayed leaving for another week, so we should see a better exhibition of color in a few days.


New England is really very picturesque. Nearly every town has a church with a steeple reaching into the sky. One of the more beautiful churches is the old Meeting House/Congregational Church in Hancock, the town in which we are staying.
The building is a combination meeting house and church, and according to a sign next to the church it was built in 1829 and moved in 1854. It is said, that the bell in the tower was cast by Paul Revere.

This combination of church and state, in one form or another, is not too uncommon in New Hampshire towns. In my home town, the town hall was downstairs and the church was upstairs. Te building was owned by the town, and the church rented to the members. Unfortunately, in recent times there has developed animosity between townspeople and the church, and a schism within the church. The members have left the building, so an empty church remains upstairs with a town hall, downstairs used for community functions such as town meetings.






Every town has cemeteries, of course. In New England towns, an old cemetery in the middle of town is a common sight. These are usually kept up fairly well and the old lichen covered marble headstone are quite picturesque. Below I have included a photograph of a cemetery in the center of Hancock.


We have extended our stay another week. The Yankee Siege is going to start their Trebuchet up on Saturday, practicing in anticipation of the Punkin Chunkin contest. See www.yankeeseige.com.

More on Quebec and On to Maine Sept 16, 209

There are quite a few museums in Quebec City, and unfortunately we only had time to visit two of them. One of the most interesting was Discovery Pavilion. Here there was a series of docuramas, with a combination of movies superimposed on a room of furniture, or an outdoor scenes. Most of the docuramas were involved with descriptions of the famous battle between the British invaders, and the French defenders in 1759. General Montcalm for the French and General Wolf for the British were shown outlining their strategic plans. Both were killed in the battle, which only lasted about 20 minutes. A visit to the museum was followed up by a tour of the battlefield on the Plains of Abraham in a bus driven by a man dressed up in a period costume of a farmer living at the time of the battle. The Plains of Abraham, outside the city walls where the battle between the French and British occurred, always had a rather biblical name to me. I was surprised to learn that it was a local name for fields being farmed by a farmer, Abraham Martin.

As discussed in the previous post we went from Quebec to Vermont, across New Hampshire and to Leeds,Maine, which is next to Turner. Turner, Maine is in the area that my mother grew up, and a place where I have numerous relatives --- first, second, and third cousins.

I wanted to pursue further genealogical research with my cousin, Horace (aka as Sonny). We had a nice visit over several days. We also had a chance to visit another cousin, Jim, who I have not seen since I was a child, probably 60 -65 years ago.

The area around Turner is very striking. The roads go over high hills on which there are fields and farms. one can look to the mountains in new Hampshire. Madeline was particularly taken with the farm houses connected to the barns through sheds and extensions of the house, so the farmers could get to their animals in the winter without going out into the cold. A picture of one such farm is shown below.

We are now in New Hampshire, and we will be here for a week or so. The leaves are turning color on the tree around the swamps and the bogs. Occasionally along the road there will be a maple tree with red leaves. We will probably be gone before the peak of the fall colors are here.

Quebec City, and Back to the USA, Sept 14, 2009

Since our last posting, we have driven to a campground near Quebec City. It was about ten miles away on the south side of the Saint Lawrence River, and an easy drive to the old city.

The old city of Quebec City is surrounded by walls, making it, we were told, the only walled city in North America. The picture on the left is of Saint John's Gate. The tower and the rampart give you an idea of the style of the wall.

The city wall is in excellent repair, and quite accessible. In fact, as you can see from the picture below, it is possible to walk on the city walls. That is your correspondent walking toward a fort in the corner of one wall, The fort, the Citadel, was built by the English during the War of 1812, in anticipation of the need to defend against an attack by the United States on Quebec City. (The attack never materialised, so a shot was never fired in anger from the fort.)



Madeline thought the old city was very reminiscent of the streets of cities and small towns in France. The streets were narrow, with two and three story buildings, built with either common walls or with very small spaces between them . The building mostly built with stone and in good repair. With written signs and the predominant conversations in French, it was a very apparent foreign (to us) country, and one would think they were in France --- very picturesque and colorful. The accompanying picture below gives you an example of what I am writing about.




There is quite a bit of street art in front of near many of the buildings The picture below show a statue of a minstrel on the end of a slide from the second floor of a building.

We left Quebec City after a few days and entered the United States through the Vermont border. We traveled on to Burlington, where we camped near Lake Champagne . The lake was very beautiful there, with a view out across islands to mountains in New York State. While in Burlington, we visited with our niece Kathy, who we have not seen for a number of years. it was a nice visit, and we wished we could have stayed longer in Burlington. Unfortunately, Labor Day was upon us, and due to our poor planning on our part, there was no available space in campgrounds in the Burlington area over the Labor Day weekend.

So we moved, driving across the Green Mountains, into Lancaster, New Hampshire. There we visited my cousin, Nancy and my friend, Bob. They took us to a nearby state park,the John Wingate Weeks Estate, which is at the end of a road, atop a nearby Mount Prospect. John Weeks was a wealthy businessman and later a politician from Massachusetts. In his later years he built a home on top of Mount Prospect, which overlooks the town of Lancaster. he built a stone tower, which still stands, and that at one time served a a fire observatory for the Forest Service. From the tower one can get an unparalleled view of the Presidential Range in the White Mountains, and a wonderful view of Mount Washington, the highest mountain in the northeast. I was surprised to learn that one can see the smoke from the cog railroad, when the train approaches the top of Mount Washington.

We were there in a day of singular clear weather. The picture above shows Mount Washington, and if you look closely, you can see a cloud of smoke from the engine of the cog-railroad train, just to the right of the peak of the mountain.

After spending Labor Day weekend in Lancaster, we drove across New Hampshire and part of Maine to Turner, to visit again my cousin, and to pursue more genealogical research.