On this page we will show how we lived out the words to Savage Garden's song "Truely Madly, Deeply" after our own fashion. In the last week of Wattle's visit we went to many places that were of a type that are listed in the song. In this picture we are standing at the Sailor's Memorial at Hampton Beach. It was here that Wattle learned just how truely mad you have to be to set foot in the waters of the north Atlantic. I had warned her that 30 seconds after you set foot into the water you will slowly lose the will to live. She agreed. But still the sun was warm and the sight of the steel grey water was lovely.
And as the song says "I want to stand on a mountain top". What better mountain to stand on than the highest peak in the northeast United States, Mount Washington. In this picture Wattle is standing at the bottom of a boulder which is the actual peak of the mountain. Mt. Washington is 6400+ feet in height ( well over a mile high). You can clearly see the frost that covers the boulder behind her. The time was just about 3 PM and the outside temperature including the wind chill was a balmy - 26°F (-32°C). The highest wind speeds on record were recorded less than 4 feet from where she is standing.
Being a real ham, I just had to show off just how manly I was in this picture. Wattle calls this her "My Mountaineer" picture. I do have to admit that I am not much of a mountaineer...we rode to the top of the mountain in a van. But still you can get an idea of how high the mountain was from the level of the clouds in the background. Those are the high fluffy clouds that are usually associated with good weather and they are about 500 feet above us.
Her is Wattle showing just how much of a mountaineer she is by standing at the same spot. You can see that the clouds barely cleared the mountain because she is in the shadows of a low flying cloud. The sign to her left is part of the Appalatian trail marking system. This hiking trail extends from Georgia in the south to Maine in the north. An experienced hiker can cover the entire distance in about 3 months.
A friendly hiker was kind enough to take this picture of us near the hiking lodge. We had been struggling to get the timer on the camera to work but it was too cold for the batteries to provide enough power to take a picture. As is easily seen the top of Mt. Washington is covered in granite boulders that were deposited by Ice Age glaciers. The whole look to the top of the mountain has more in common with a Moonscape than anything you would expect to find on Earth.