First Fall Color on the UNH Campus

Sarah from the Office of Conduct and Management (where I work, casually known as the OCM) told me I needed to see the fall color early when the first leaves started to turn, then again at the peak of the season. I had wanted to hike up Mount Major near Lake Winnipesaukee to check out the trees and the views of the lake, but unfortunately, the homework load didn't let us. Instead, Ashley and I drove down to campus, which he hadn't had time to really check out yet.

It was family weekend, which meant a ton of parents and little kids, and an inordinate number of students out and about for a Saturday afternoon, but it was still nice. We wandered through the trails and looked for the College Woods, but could not find them. We guessed that they were the little woodsy breaks between clusters of buildings on campus and wrote off the grandeur of the name College Woods to the tiny New England scale of things ("Guys, this mountain is huge!"), but a quick Google search proves us wrong. We actually drove through part of them on the way home, to avoid the family weekend traffic; it's a big 250 acre nature preserve that the campus shoulders up against, with plenty of hiking and biking trails. Another time, College Woods, maybe deeper into fall or after the first snow.

Anyway, here's pictures from around campus.

We've got wicked oak trees here.

The camera doesn't really capture how vivid these red leaves were. Some of the trees look like they're on fire.

These little dudes are all over campus, and love to run under the feet of passersby, stand paralyzed with fear for a second, then run back under the bush they came from.

Hitchcock Hall, on the upper quad, where I work.

Groundhog! Woodchuck1 Whistle Pig! Land Beaver!

The backside of Thompson Hall, which is the cool old building they like to show people on the website.

Defacing signs is big here.

Things that I like (so far)

Last night on the phone, my mom mentioned she's been reading my blog (hi mom). “It's good. Remember to keep it positive,” she said. And I laughed. It has been a little whiny and gripy around thisisnolongertheroadtrip, so I'm going to try and pick things up a little bit. Here are some of the things that I've found and absolutely loved.

• The bridge from Kittery to Portsmouth. You cross from Maine to New Hampshire over the Piscataqua on a cool bridge built as a memorial to New Hampshire's fallen World War I soldiers and sailors. Entering Portsmouth, you can look to your right and see an old line of riverfront brick buildings, their sides right up against the river. Every time I see them I feel for a second that I'm not looking at buildings on the Piscataqua, but on the Thames. There's another awesome bridge from Portsmouth to Newington that crosses a small bay always crowded with white sailboats. It's gorgeous, and looks so New England.

• The UNH campus. It's old and made of bricks. It's got bell towers and halls named after local scholars, and somewhere in it, Charles Simic is probably hanging out writing something genius.

• Deb, the helpful hairstylist. I got a haircut today in a tiny walk-in place on Central street in Dover. Deb, the barber, asked if I came here often to get my hair cut by Al. I said no, and that I was new in town. “Welcome to Dover,” she said, and launched into a long list of the best places to eat, to buy groceries and home furnishings, to pick local fruit, and to buy cheap gas. Ashley and I got tons of ideas of places to eat and things to do. Cheers, Deb!

• The cemeteries. Turns out when the area has been inhabited for four hundred years, there are lots of cemeteries. Ashley and I walked around a big one today just outside of Portsmouth. It's weird to see names of families I recognize from buildings on UNH's campus, or the handful of state parks we drove past yesterday. I thought about last summer when we walked around Bayview cemetery in Bellingham and marveled at the grave stones from the 1890s and early 1900s. Today I saw the grave of a preacher who was buried in 1731. Many of the graves from the 1800s had fresh flowers on them—family members still come to honor their lineage. “Nobody stays in one place for one hundred years in the west,” Ashley said. It's a very different sense of history.

• Tuttle Farm. On our way back from the cemetery we stopped at Tuttle farm, the oldest continually running family farm in the country (est. 1632). I've complained before on here about the weirdness of the grocery stores—no good cheese or peanut butter, unfamiliar brands, etc. Tuttle farm fixed all this. It carries mostly locally grown organics (most of them grown at Tuttle farm itself), along with tons of plants and herbs, candles, locally made soaps, and all that crazy hippie crap I'm used to in Bellingham. The place even smelled like the Bellingham Co-op. We're definitely going back.