> Thanks for the tip, Sam, that was an excellent choice.

Glad you liked it! As I said to you in an email, that restaurant is an annual ritual for Darleen and me, and in fact her whole family. We'd go there more often if it were just a hair closer.

Besides great food, a key attraction is the electric train that runs on a track on a shelf near the ceiling. The train snakes around through both dining rooms and through covered bridges. What is it about electric trains that capture the imagination so?

> On an incidental note, Grant's Super did not turn out to be the dump it was promised to be. ;)

You're too kind. Really. Too kind. For the benefit of others, Grant's Supermarket, across the street from the Glen Junction restaurant, is a RinkWorks landmark, in that it's where Dave (or "Parker's boy," as he is better known there) used to work when he was in high school.

> But where's the so-called world's worst weather on the summit? Each time I visit, it's always been a bit chilly but we've yet to see snow up there, heh.

Try it in the winter sometime. ;-)

My experience is largely yours. Chilly and windy is as bad as I've seen it, save for when we went up with Brunnen-G, and then the fog -- an actual cloud, really -- was so thick, you couldn't see more than eight or ten feet in any direction. It wasn't raining, but the moisture in the air was enough to soak you.

Everywhere else in the state that day was warm and cloudless.

The legendarily bad weather, though, the worst weather in the world, seems to be the province of winter. The highest wind velocity ever recorded was atop Mount Washington, and the temperatures and snow are brutal. You may have seen a short video playing somewhere in the house on the summit. It's a little skit where a couple of guys pretend that they're at a posh restaurant. One guy is the waiter, serving the other guy, who has elected to dine on the veranda. But the snow is so thick and the wind is so fast, they can hardly walk, and all the food and drink blows away in an instant.

> Anyway, we had checked into our timeshare in North Conway and I went for walks. There's lots of pleasant little antique stores around town, as well as Zeb's and The Penguin Shop. For a "factory outlet" town though, it's somewhat surprising in that there's not much shopping available for the technogeeks in my family. There's no Circuit City, for example. There isn't any Costco (it's down near the Massachusetts border) and the closest Best Buy is in Maine...!?
>
> It makes me wonder whether the state taxes are prohibitive in NH for large business vendors.

It's the culture, not the taxes. The taxes are *wonderful* for businesses in New Hampshire, especially compared to Maine and Massachusetts, the former being the highest taxed state in the union and the latter having the reputation for it.

Why no CostCo in North Conway? One, there aren't the people to support it. True, during the tourist seasons there are the raw numbers, but the locals aren't tech geeks (tech geeks move to the Boston area, or Portland Maine, or further, where the actual tech companies are), and the tourists don't go to North Conway to shop at CostCo. Two, as a well-preserved pocket of New England culture and heritage and a popular tourist trap, I'm quite sure the town itself takes every step it can with a controlling planning board and restrictive zoning laws to make sure things like CostCo's don't blight the environs.

> We had an even more interesting time checking out rock formations in "Lost River Gorge and Boulder Caverns" on Route 112W. I don't know if any of you have ever been there, but this place was like the top of Loon Mountain, multiplied by a factor of eleventeen. Seriously, Sam, if you ever host another RinkUnion in New Hampshire, you'll have to include Lost River on the agenda.

Sounds like a plan!


It sounds like you had a great trip; I'm just sorry I couldn't pop up to see you while you were there. It's great to hear your enthusiasm for the natural beauty of the area. I think it's a pretty special place.