Sue and I boarded Beau for a couple of days, and took a short vacation trip up to Sugar Hill, NH to celebrate our 5th anniversary and to catch the turn of the foliage season up there.

Before leaving, we made sure all was well with Swayzie and new baby Rezleigh. We'd only be an hour and a half away, and we knew there were so many other family that would want to visit. With the severe limitations on hospital visitors, I told Colin that as soon as they got Rezleigh home, we'd be on their doorstep to see her.

We headed out early Wednesday morning 10/12/22, wandering up 28 and then over to 153 into North Conway where we took 302 through Brenton Woods, Bethlehem, and into Littleton.

Sue had grown up in Tamworth and lived in Lisbon and Sugar Hill, and so was very familiar with all of the areas. But she was so surprised at how much Littleton had changed. We enjoyed walking around in Littleton for awhile before heading over to where we would be staying at the Sunset Hill House in Sugar Hill.

I'm not even providing a link to the Sunset Hill House as we were so, so very disappointed at what the new owner did to this lovely country inn by getting rid of all the period furniture, and completely obliterating the character of what had been such a lovely representation of a quaint New England inn into a minimalistic, modern attempt at recreating some flashy upscale hotel in New York City. Shame on him for destroying a place that had such a great historic presence in the area. We will not go back. I even wrote a quite scathing Yelp review on it.

Sue had planned out our return route down some of the more scenic back roads into the Franconia and then to Cannon Mountain and the Franconia Notch State Park area where we got out and walked back over the Conway Scenic Railroad tracks to get some really expansive views of the Notch.

We then cut east through Holderness, and had a wonderful lunch at Walter's Basin Restaurant on Squam Lake, which was actually featured in the classic 1981 movie, On Golden Pond, which, by the way, we watched that evening after getting back home, firing up the wood stove, and pouring a glass of wine.