The forecasted rain never came, so we ended up sitting in the tent for four hours before eventually falling asleep. Anticipating the storm, we hadn’t bought any firewood for the night, so being in the tent with our little LED lantern was better than sitting outside with the mosquitos. On the positive side, we awoke to a dry tent!
After breakfast and showers at the coin-operated ones just outside the campground, we started driving west. We’re heading to New Hampshire for the night, and the driving time is about four and a half hours. We don’t have anything planned for the day, so decided to check off another of our USA food list items by having lunch at Olive Garden. Katie had been to one before, but I never had, and the restaurant chain comes up enough in popular culture that I wanted to know what it was like. They all seem to be situated along the interstate highways, so I think they’re a bit of an American road-trip institution. The eggplant parmigiana was good, and the unlimited bread sticks were garlicy and yum.
Back on the highway again, we finally hit the rainstorm that we’d been expecting since yesterday. Torrential rain slowed the traffic considerably, and our wipers struggled to maintain a clear patch of windscreen to see out of. It’s much nicer to be driving in weather like this, than to be hiking or sitting in a campground. Another benefit of driving in heavy rain is that it cleans all the dead bugs off the front of the tent!
An hour or so later we stopped at Tuckerman Brewery to try some of their New England style IPAs (our favourite), grab a coaster for our collection, and use their Wi-Fi to upload the last three days of blog posts. There were some long lanes painted on the ground, which seemed to be for playing competition games of ‘corn hole’. The equipment consists of two slanted boards with a hole in them, and two sets of beanbags. Each player takes turns standing at the far end of the lane and throwing their beanbags towards the board (angled towards them) at the other end, trying to get them in the hole.
The seating consisted of a few columns of picnic tables, arranged so that they formed long four long tables. While we were sitting there, we watched a little baby having a lot of fun crawling back and forth down the tunnel created by the gap in the table legs where one joined onto the next. As we were getting ready to leave, a live band was tuning up. It would have been nice to stay, but we also wanted to get to our campsite and cook dinner before it was dark.
We arrived at Jigger Johnson campground in the White Mountains of New Hampshire at about sunset. It’s situated on the famous Kancamagus Highway, which winds through incredible forests and river valleys as it traverses the mountain range. The campground is beautiful; the trees just beginning to turn red, and the ground covered in a carpet of orange pine needles. This campground has several long-term residents who serve as ‘camp hosts’, maintaining the campground and making sure everyone has a good stay. I don’t think they’re official Forest Service employees though, so payment for the site is handled by an ‘Iron Ranger’, a big steel post with a slot cut in it, where you deposit an envelope with the relevant fee. We bought some firewood from one of the camp hosts, and they also changed some notes into quarters for us to use in the showers tomorrow morning.
Once we’d chosen a site, we parked up and walked back to the entrance to deposit our envelope with all our info written on the form on its outside. On our way we met three other campers, who were all surprised that we’d come all the way here from New Zealand! One guy who we walked with for a while told us proudly of the conversion he’d done to his Mazda, building a sleeping platform inside, with a whole range of other camping conveniences like a propane cooker and a little dog bed. He’s going to come by tomorrow to show it off and check out our roof tent!