Lake Winnipesaukee – 30 September 2011

The day started with a breakfast trip to a typical American Diner. The Farmers Diner car was an original semi-Worcester Streamliner from 1946. Many of the fittings inside were also original.

After an impossibly huge meal of pancakes etc, we set off to visit the Cornish-Windsor Bridge, the longest wooden bridge in the States and the second longest two-span covered bridge in the world. Today the water was brown from the earlier floods, but appeared to be running at not much more than a normal level. A bystander said that during the hurricane floods, the water level was right up to the bridge.

We travelled on to Hanover where the road passed through the heart of the campus of Dartmouth University, the place where BASIC was invented, and sat at a pedestrian crossing while students poured past in both directions. It seemed as though we would need to wait until lectures finished for the day before we could proceed legally so we simply edged through the milling student throng and hoped the State Troopers were not watching. From there our route to Meredith touched on the most southern part of the White Mountains; here the red colours were pretty solid on the mountainsides.

Meredith is built on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, and was a great little town to wander around. We discovered a mill race built by John Swasey in 1816. The source of the water was Lake Waukewan, at the north end of town.