OK, I've got some pics for yah's. They aren't all that great as Joann was using her little point'n shoot camera. Now that she's used to taking pictures during the rides (she just started on our vacation last month) I have to get her to use my (bigger) Kodak Z812. Even that is pretty compact. You guys (and gals) swinging the big DSLRs with tele lenses around on the bikes have my admiration. :blink:
Without further ado...
We didn't get any pictures of the bike drop. But that has been pretty well documented by others. In any case, I'll pick it up after the "restart"...
Somewhere along Rte 10
Then it was Micheal's favorite, Pinnacle Rd and Orfordville Rd past the town of Hardscrabble, NH. If you didn't know there was a town there, you'd have never guessed it.
Oh yeah Mikey, it was definitely intentional. I'll make sure to include a little dirt on all of my future rides just for you, bud.
Did I mention that some of the covered bridges are on dirt roads?
Back on the tarmac on Rt 25A...
First stop in the little village of Warren, NH...
Eric was wondering if a 1st gen FJR is really faster than a redstone missle...
As the heat built up through the day, unfortunately so did the haziness...
We did hit a little traffic congestion in Lincoln, certainly to be expected on a summer weekend. But it sure is a pretty little town surrounded by some good size hills.
Riding the
Kancamagus Scenic Highway... It's famous for a reason.
Check out the sky. Do you think we got lucky with the weather?
Rest stop at the Top of the Kanc, just after "the hairpin". When we first got off the bikes, Michael was absolutely giddy. "That was awesome. That's the best road I've ever ridden on!!" His enthusiasm is highly contagious. Eric and his friend on the Gixxer took off back from where we had just come so they could ride through the hairpin again with a little more gusto.
Did I mention hazy? View from the top on Saturday
Same view back in February '08
Back out on the road, down the east side of the Kanc and then up and over Bear Notch Rd to Bartlett
The Swift River (no kidding, that's its name) that runs along much of the east side of the Kanc.
And on up Rte 302 through Crawford Notch
Past the old and regal Mount Washington Hotel into Bretton Woods for lunch.
The camera was forgotten for a while during lunch stop in favor of chowing down. After lunch we zipped down into the town of Twin Mountain and jumped on Rte 3 headed south, where we were able to pick up the pace a little with some better opportunities to pass the slower traffic. Rte 3 joins I93 at the base of Cannon Mountain. The best skiing in New Hampshire, IMO...
The trail directly underneath the tramway cables is called "Bodie's Run". It is one steep and rocky mother...
At this point, I93 is a divided 2 lane through Franconia Notch.
Profile Lake
And then suddenly as you round a turn, up in the cliffs above, on the back side of Cannon Mt., there it... isn't. Well it used to be. The famous "Old Man of the Mountain", depicted on every recent piece of tourist propaganda put out by the state of NH, including being (still) featured on our license plates.
The "Old Man" was a group of several individual cliff prominences that when viewed from the side gave the profile of the Old Man. The ledges had been naturally eroding for eons, and some locals had been working on holding it in place with pitons and wires for the past few decades, until finally the Face fell off the mountain.
It used to be in the scraggly section to the far right of the cliffs in this picture, just under the highest peak point.
It's hard to get a sense of the scale of things from pictures like this. These cliffs are a favorite climbing area for people with an addiction to adrenaline. There are probably several climbers on the cliffs in this picture, but it takes a while scanning with binoculars to find them. What looks like small rocks at the base are actually huge car sized bolder chunks that calved off the face of the cliffs.
We probably should have stopped, but just rolled on through. It was cooler while on the move...
Clark's Trading Post in Woodstock. The big draw here used to be their trained black bears. Don't know if they still do that anymore. Haven't stopped here since the kids were little.
We then encountered Skooter Granny on RT 175. She was a bad-ass granny and didn't want that murdercycle gang passing her, so she hugged the centerline at her skooter's top speed, about 25mph. We were past her in a blink after the first curve.
Bagged a covered bridge, Blair Bridge, just before getting into Plymouth.
From Plymouth it was a cruise along the Baker river and down the lower part of RT 118 that has been repaved and allowed us to pick up the pace again. Somehow the camera got put away there...
Then we hooked up with Rte 4 for a while through some of the old Shaker towns along Mascoma Lake.
Finally, and none too soon, we jumped on Interstate 89 for a quick cool-down blast back to the hotel.
to be continued in the Green Mountains.