Grandma Chris came to visit for a long weekend, and we dragged her all over New Hampshire! Or at least that's what it felt like to me... a very busy four days. We started with a stop at the Warner Fall Foliage Festival on Friday night, to visit the midway and listen a little to Buffalo Plaid. That night we learned that Aiden should never be allowed to gamble at Foxwoods or anywhere else when he gets old enough. His 7-year old version of gambling is the cork air gun game at the midway. He is SO excited to shoot, gets his corks, pumps the lever to cock the gun, and aims... and he's a pretty good shot. He can hit can after can after can. The problem is, you can hit all the cans you like and you just win a small dopey prize that he doesn't want. If you want a BIG prize (and he does) you have to hit a little metal square like a zippo lighter, and you have to hit it clean off the shelf. Which, I should mention, is fairly impossible to do, which is why the big prizes like real air rifles and pogo sticks wired onto the walls look like they've been there since 1983. It's hard explaining this reality to a kid though. Every time he didn't win the big prize, Aiden got all mopey and depressed (classic gambling low) and even mad. He refused to pick a small prize several times and we had to pick one out and give it to Haley (who by the way made out like a bandit with a rainbow pony, bubble gun, and glow light saber) He would agree the game was totally rigged and stupid. But give him another three dollars and what did he want to do?! Oooh, oooh! The shooting game! (Sigh.)
On Saturday morning we hurried through breakfast and drove straight to the Massabesic Audubon center to help with a bird banding demo. When we arrived, it was mass chaos- over 20 birds had hit the nets right off the bat, and they were getting them bagged and lining them up on a clothesline to be banded. There were lots of ruby-crowned kinglets, white-throated sparrows, cardinals, and chickadees. As the morning wore on, the birds slowed down considerably, so that by the time the demonstration was actually open to the public at 10am, we were crossing our fingers for birds to band and show the crowd. Luckily, we did get a pretty steady trickle of new birds in the nets: downy woodpecker, goldfiinch, house sparrow, song sparrow, house finch, white breasted nuthatch... it was a good day, and as always it was fun to help with extracting birds from the nets.
We went straight from bird banding to Mount Sunapee and a birthday celebration for Ben. This included a quick donut-on-a-string game courtesy of the Mt. Sunapee BBQ Festival, and then we took the chairlift up the mountain through the drizzly fog to the summit. The plan was a hike to Lake Solitude, but it was so chilly at the top that Grandma Chris and Haley decided to stay in the summit lodge instead of hiking. The rest of us carried on into the fog. Despite there being absolutely no views, it was actually a very cool and almost creepy hike through the misty and moss covered forest... the kids chattered on about zombies the entire time they were hiking, and the images from the day sort of remind me of a Lord of the Rings scene. After the hike we all convened at the Andersons for pizza and cake and the warmth of the first wood fire of the season.
Sunday was an entirely different day, weather wise. Blue and beautiful. We decided to enjoy it by visiting Poverty Lane Orchards in Lebanon to pick apples in their heirloom orchard. The heirloom orchard turned out to be such a cool experience- each tree in this relatively small orchard is numbered, and you get a "key" when you start which lists each number, the variety of apple, and what the apple is good for (eating, baking, cider, etc.). We tasted so many apples that morning! Most of them we'd never even heard of- Wicksun, Chisel Jersey, Pomme Grise, Yellow Bellflower, Winesap, St. Edmond's Pippin... literally dozens of different heirloom apples. Some were truly horrible. Others were delicious- our favorite was the "Granite Beauty" which was huge and red, tart and crisp. Chris filled half a bag with them to bring back to Dan & Paulette on Long Island.
And then, on Columbus Day monday, we were back to another fair- this one was the biggest I have been to in New Hampshire- the Sandwich Fair. It was a nice weather day and we enjoyed the agricultural exhibits and a cool frisbee dog show. Haley got traumatized by a bunch of over aggressive goats in the petting pen, but a gentle mini-pony redeemed her love for farm animals later that day as she got to brush and comb it's mane and tail. Aiden was sucked into the emotional roller coaster that is the cork air gun game at the midway, once again. We managed to get him out with only two or three games played this time... and of course, no big prizes! It was a fun day, but I'm all faired out for the rest of this year. I will happily wait until next summer for another taste of cotton candy, fried dough, bacon on a stick, or the thrill of the cork popping out of that air gun!
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Grandpa Rising grew Wiinesap apples. He had a tree at our Glen Head house on the North Shore of LI. I think he tried to graft some of it to trees in BW. Not sure if it ever took. One year he put sandwich bags on the growing apples to keep the bugs off. The apple was supposed to fIll the bag and thus have a plastic coating. They never grew that big. I think this was when he got the Organic Gardener Magazine.
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