Bee Travel
New Hampshire: life after the 'old man'
CHRISTINE HICKS- USTA Travel
My niece is currently working in New Hampshire. She's with something called Nature's Classroom, teaching one-week units to kids brought in from all over the place. She shows them how to make wallets out of aluminum foil and other out-of-the-box things, things that may come in handy but always twist the brain, as is intended.

She lives in a cabin of sorts on Lake Ossipee, in the White Mountains, and hangs out at a place that has "Moose" in its name. She's young enough to enjoy it, and smart enough to take care of herself.

She's lucky enough, too, to land a job in some of the prettiest country ever. The White Mountains, for reasons not entirely clear to me, grabbed my heart some years ago. While on a road trip through New England, the return trip took us fortuitously through New Hampshire. We pulled in to a motel for an overnight stay, a structure thickly coated with mountain green paint, as though wanting to blend in with the trees that carpeted the valley in which it rested. The screen door on the unit sported a wooden "x" of support but wobbled nonetheless with the opening and closing of it. And it banged hard against the frame as it closed, a noise typical, then muffled as it reverberated into the evergreens nestled all around.

I don't recall the name of the motel. But its address was perfect: Franconia, White Mountains, New Hampshire. Morning fog formed and floated just above our heads as we headed out for coffee in the morning. It was summer. Still, the mountain air cooled our coffee, manifesting white steam against the green velvet of evergreens that were just everywhere. It's the kind of place where you want to stay another day, but can't quite rustle the wherewithal to just spend a day sitting, looking at pine trees...though, surely, they deserve it, in all their majesty.

Tires crunched on the stony pavement as we departed for White Mountain sights. At the time, there was the "Old Man in the Mountain" a geological carving, a façade that once emulated a man's face in profile. This face was referenced in legend by Indians as far back as 1604. Its "discovery" in 1805 may, in some ways, have been its undoing. For in subsequent years, measurements were taken and repairs effected, until its final destructive collapse in May of 2003. There was great speculation in the travel industry that this would spell an immediate and unrecoverable drought in tourists to New Hampshire.

Such has not been the case, for there's more to these mountains than the "old man" who once posed there. There's the Mount Washington Cog Railway, the spectacular Kancamagus Highway from Lincoln to Conway. There's hiking, biking, horseback riding, not to mention lots of children's attractions. In summer, there are festivals of every sort in towns dotting the two-lane highways through the mountains and valleys here.

And then there are the mountains themselves - reason enough to want to go and stay.

(Christine Hicks-Usta has enjoyed more than 30 years of globe-trotting as a member of the travel industry in various capacities. Direct questions to her at Bee Group Newspapers, P.O. Box 150, Buffalo, NY 14231-0150.)