Christmas Eve we hiked Mt. Monadnock in Southern New Hampshire. It was a beautiful sunny day, although it was pretty cold, and very windy up on the top with no trees to block the wind. There wasn't very much snow, but there was lots of ice, so we had to go pretty slow. We went up the White Dot Trail and came down the White Cross. We saw lots of other people out hiking, which isn't surprising, since this is supposed to be the 2nd most hiked mountain in the world. We even managed to get a nice hiker to take our picture so that we didn't have to worry about the wind blowing our camera off a rock while using the self-timer.
Christmas Day we were planning on heading over to Keene to visit MF, but the weather forecast was for 2 feet of snow, so we decided to stay home and watch James Bond movies all day. It was very relaxing, although we only ended up getting a foot and a half of snow.
The next day, Craig, Suzanne and Stacy made it up. Unfortunately Jackie had to get back to Texas so she didn't make it up this year. Also Lynda and Jamie didn't get to come up either, so it was a smaller group than usual, but we got a good Trivial Pursuit game in anyway.
We then headed up to Bar Harbor for a few days. They had gotten lots of snow as well, so we rented cross-country skis for a couple days and got some exercise while exploring the island a little and enjoying the ocean. Roger and Donna joined us the first day for a trip along part of the park loop road. It was another beautiful sunny day, and fairly warm too. It made for a good reintroduction to cross-country skiing, which neither of us have done in many years.
The next day was much colder, so we decided to do some inland trails, so we started at the Jordan Pond House, and skied down to Seal Cove along Jordan Stream. We got sort of lost for a while following a snowshoers tracks through the woods, but eventually made it back out to a carriage road so that we could find our way back to the truck.
Before heading back to Chicago, we stopped in Portland to visit Aaron and Emily in their new apartment. They took us out to dinner at The Great Lost Bear. We also had another rousing game of Trivial Pursuit.
