New Hampshire Trip

 Mrs Dex and I took a two day mini-cation to New Hampshire last week to go on a moose excursion. We stayed in Lincoln and visited a few other interesting places there. It's a small town (pop. 1,631 as of 2020 census!) that gets a lot of skiers going to Loon Mountain. Obviously, July is not ski season.

 

The excursion was a lot of fun. It took a few hours of driving around before seeing a moose but the guides on the tour bus kept us entertained and we even got to see a Bullwinkle cartoon. We only got to see one but it was definitely worth it!

 

Sweetz & More was just a short walk from our hotel. We had actually gone to another location in a mall last year. If there's any candy you can recall from your childhood, you can probably find it here. There's a sizable area with baskets of individual candies so you can make a bag of your favorites. They've also got stuff from England and Japan.

 

 There's also an entire wall with various sodas.

 

 I love trying new sodas but there were just too many to choose from!

 

Another local shop we stopped in was The Christmas Loft. You might guess from the name that it's a year-round Christmas shop full of decorations, and you'd be right. But, it also has a Halloween section!

 

They have two locations, and of course the one that was an hour away from where we were staying had a separate store just for Halloween. It's called Tricks & Treats and also has an ice cream shop. Like I said, Lincoln is a small town and we didn't really have anything else to do. The majority of the drive took us through White Mountain National Forest which has some beautiful scenic spots. It got a little sketchy in places with no cell signal. The phone wasn't loading the map but thankfully GPS was still able to guide us.

 

The last notable place we went was Clark's Bears (aka Clark's Trading Post). I went there once when I was a kid so it was...a long time ago! It's an amusement park where the big draw is live bear shows.

 

I'll be honest, I barely (no pun intended) remember going here and online it sounded like more fun than it actually was. It's not one of those amusement parks that's a ton of fun for adults without kids. 

 

There's a couple of small museums with all sorts of Americana on display, including some board games from the 1880s to the early 1900s.

 

 The highlight of our almost two hour stay in the park was the train ride aboard a 1920 steam engine. It's about a 20 minute ride which goes through a covered bridge. But what makes it great is encountering the infamous Wolfman who follows the train as he tries to chase you away from his mine.

 

 There's jeep trails that run through the woods alongside the tracks so you can see him stalking the train from spot to spot. In addition to hurling insults, he's got a rifle that he fires off to scare you away.

 

 And that wraps up our two day jaunt to New Hampshire. I took a lot more pics than I posted here. You can flip through the album below or head to Flickr for a better look.