Ramblings from the White Mountains

We drove up to NH on Friday for a "company trip". This is a new concept for me, and I have to say, I rather like it. The way it works is this: If the company does well in year x, then, in year x+1 all the employees get to go on a company sponsored vacation. There is a (limited) choice of dates/destinations and the hotel/resort is paid for for the whole family (extra for food for children over the age of 5, and, for now, all three of mine are 5 or under).

Jeff and I really love New Hampshire. We live in Massachusetts where, in the eastern part at least, the political climate is hotly liberal. New Hampshire is like a cool breeze for us McCain supporters (I won't get started in this post...). On the drive up we passed a car with the driver's political views spray painted on the window:

"NOBAMA"
"The best social program is a JOB"
and others.

So you don't get the wrong idea, I am actually a liberal at heart. I mean, I think I am on the right side of most moral debates. For instance, I am pro-choice, I think that whom a person chooses to marry is completely up to that person (and his choice of partner, of course). I used to be totally into small-scale communism (I don't think it works for political systems governing more than a community's worth of people) and still think that medicine might be better when socialized. But, in the last few years, I have been reading media from the other side. The Wall Street Journal is informing some of my more recent opinions. I am no longer a democrat because I feel my party has let me down.

But I digress.

This post is supposed to be about how amazingly beautiful New Hampshire is.

The White Mountains are breathtaking. I was up there a bunch of years ago to go to my friends' wedding (Jill and Steve) in Franconia Notch. Every where you look are green mountains and the way they interleave themselves in the landscape is just the way you would draw them if you were setting up a fantasy landscape. All the dark green in the foreground, working its way back to the light gray in the distance. Add in some late afternoon shadows and you've got me back to believing in God (well, maybe not the way the Rabbis would have wanted me to, but good enough).

I've always thought that I was the ocean kind of person; I believed myself incapable of living more than 50 miles from the ocean. I am now convinced that mountains may be more to the heart of me.