A Winnipesaukee Week
Sean & Allison and the little guys. Click to enlarge.
A view of Lake Winnipesaukee from Mount Major, a hugely popular hiking trail. Click to enlarge.
Spent a recent week kicking around Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire for the first time in years. My daughter, Allison Sterner, her husband, Sean, and their boys, Cy, who will be 5 in October, and Andy, who turned 2 in May, had a cabin maybe 100 feet away from the one Susan and I rented. We were in Tuftonboro, just north of Wolfeboro.
Cy did a lot of fishing while at Lake Winnipesaukee. Click to enlarge
Winnipesaukee, about 21 miles long and up to 9 miles wide, is mostly surrounded by cottages and homes, some of them old, elegant summer getaway places, some of them huge, new and ostentatious. I paddled my kayak almost every day, exploring maybe 12 miles of shoreline, so I saw plenty of these properties. Almost everybody has some kind of powerboat and the lake can be noisy with engine noise during the day. Moreover, not a minute goes by without a boat wake crashing ashore. Water skiers everywhere; by 7 a.m. the ski boats appear to take advantage of the calm early morning surface water. I was often out in my kayak thinking how nice it would be if there could be a couple of hours each morning – say, 6 to 8 a.m. – without any water skiing, maybe a speed limit during that time of 10 mph. The lake can be so blissfully serene before the powerboats come out that I am surprised there isn’t some kind of restriction like that. Anyway, I had some quiet moments around 6 a.m. before the noise picked up. Despite the extensively developed shoreline, the lake itself is clear and appears healthy, helped no doubt by its sheer mass of water; the lake is 212 feet deep at its deepest.
Andy, 2, loved splashing around in the shallow water. Click to enlarge.
Also did yoga many mornings on the dock at our little complex of cabins, called Museum Lodge Resort. A woman in the complex new to yoga joined me several mornings and I taught her a sequence of poses to get her started on her yoga journey.
The grandkids had a blast, of course, as did the rest of us. Cy, introduced to fishing just last summer, wanted to fish every day and caught dozens of sunfish, bluegills, rock bass and even a couple of smallmouth bass. He and Sean and I hiked to the nearby Abenaki Tower one morning. It was a short hike, perfect for a beginner trekker not yet 5 years old.
As for Andy, he had a grand time splashing around in the shallow water at the beach that was no more than 150 feet from our cabins.
I managed to get in two nice hikes, climbing Bald Knob one day, with views of the lake from the east, and Mount Major another day, with views of the lake from the west side.
Here I am hiking to Abenaki Tower with Cy. Photo by Sean Sterner. Click to enlarge.