Here, at last, is my long-delayed vacation report. Like most vacations, it was great fun and relaxing, though despite that, I seemed to require some time after I got home to recover from the actual vacation. It’s an odd phenomenon, but one that I’ve frequently experienced.

My trip was basically a retreat into the mountains of New Hampshire, where I stayed at the family cabin [pic] of a friend of mine (in New Hampton, NH).  My vacation began on July 28 with a train ride to Rhode Island, where I met up with my friend. The next day, we spent a couple hours driving up to the cabin.

The next day, July 30, we went to Attitash Mountain, where we rode the legendary alpine slide (which can be seen here, in a photo taken by me while riding the chair lift up the mountain). The alpine slide is this cement track that runs down the side of the mountain (sort of like a luge or bobsled track). It’s more than a mile long, and you ride down the track in a little cart (which I should have photographed, damn it) in which you sit upright with a brake lever between your legs that you use to control your rate of descent. We figured you must achieve speeds of around 25 MPH or so at top speed. It’s really a lot of fun, though there were several slow-poke scaredy cats who ruined a few of our rides. By my count, we rode the slide 8 times (which is a lot considering that you have to spend maybe 20 minutes between rides, between the short wait in line and the actual chair lift ride up the mountain); maybe 2 or 3 of them were screwed up by the slow pokes. You see, you go down the slide while others are ahead of you; the handlers give each slider a good lead before they let the next one go, but when you ride the brake the whole time, people are going to catch up to you. There are two parallel tracks, so sometimes you can guess who will be the slow poke and avoid going in their track, but sometimes you can’t predict these things, and sometimes you get someone so slow that they backup the whole damn ride like a traffic jam.

While I had no desire to go slow, by the end of the day, I did come to realize why some people were, shall we say, rather fond of the brake. On one of our slide runs, the cart I was in didn’t seem to be functioning properly; it seemed kind of unstable and the brake didn’t seem to be well, braking. So I was going really fast, and there are places on the track where it tells you to slow down, and I kind of think you have to, or else bad things will happen. I could imagine the slide flying off the track when you go into one of the banked curves. Which isn’t what happened to me, but it’s not far from the truth. I fell off after one of the curves.  

Yeah, so after one of the curves, my sled was really unstable and since I couldn’t slow down, there wasn’t really anything I could do about it, and as I tried to regain control of the sled, it somehow leaned too far to the side and slid out from under me, dumping me onto the track, at which point I continued sliding down it for several dozen feet. The cart landed between the two tracks. After I fell, someone on the other track rode by, saw what happened, and apparently without any concern for my safety, said, “Well, that sucks.” As it happened, I was fine, if somewhat disoriented. But I got up (and quickly too, lest a racer behind me come barreling down the slide), reclaimed my sled and rode the rest of the way down.

Later, the accident would hurt more, as I ended up with abrasions on my knee and elbow that didn’t feel too good after the adrenaline wore off. And, as it would happen, I nearly fell off again later–I managed to keep my balance that time, but I scraped up my other knee and my wrist in the process, my wrist injury being the worst of the bunch (though none were serious).

Other than that, Attitash was great fun, and really has got to be one of the most fun places on Earth. It’s certainly the best amusement park I’ve ever been to. Why? Because the rides are not just mechanical contraptions you ride in; you’re actually participating in all of the attractions. Besides the alpine slide, they’ve also got two great big water slides. In one of them, you ride down the slide (which twists and turns along the way) while sitting on a little mat, so you’re really a part of the action. On the other one, you ride down a similar sort of water slide, but you’re riding on a big inner tube (with either one, two, or three person capacities). We (along with friend’s brother and friend’s cousin, who made the trip with us) tried all of the above, and much to my surprise riding each type was quite a different experience. As was riding down backwards, and we discovered too that putting most of the weight in front of the raft made a big difference too, resulting in our greatest rate of speed. Weight in front, raft going backwards, three passengers seemed to be the most fun, though after doing that a few times, I felt a bit queasy and so wouldn’t have wanted to keep it up.

My only complaint about Attitash is that on the water slides, they wouldn’t let you wear sandals or any kind of foot-covering, and you had to walk up a long asphalt road on a steep incline in your bare feet. Seemed like no one but me had any problem with it, but I guess my feet are overly sensitive, as I found it somewhat painful. 

Overall, a great, great day. We couldn’t have asked for better weather, and the place wasn’t even crowded, so we didn’t spend more than ten minutes waiting in line at any one time.

On the way back, we stopped at some scenic places along the way, including a lake (which I can’t remember the name of) where we saw some ducks, and the Silver Cascade waterfall.  

Other things we did include:

• playing mini-golf at Pirate’s Cove.
• Visiting Loon Mountain
• Ate at Polly’s Pancake Parlor
• Saw a Stone Iron Furnace
• Saw the Old Man in the Mountain (or where he used to be, anyway)
• Went to the lake at Wellington State Park, where our inner tube raft was attached by child pirates wearing water-wings
• Played more mini-golf, this time at the Weirs Beach boardwalk on the shabby American monuments course
• Went to an arcade called Funspot, which featured a bunch of classic video games, such as Tron and Burger Time
• Had a campfire at which we ate hot dogs and smores
  

All in all, quite a fun trip. Click here to see the complete photoset on Flickr.