Lil' Vermont Trip
Starting when I was about 10 my family made a bunch of trips to the Vermont/New Hampshire border so my mom could participate in a trial run of rheumatoid arthritis treatments at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. This was a huge deal for us because we didn't go on a lot of vacations, at least not ones where we stayed in fancy Holiday Inns with pools and HBO. We LOVED going on these trips. We would stay in White River Junction, Vermont. The hotel experience was very new and exciting to us. I had never been in a hot tub before and being an insecure 11 year old I wore my LONG SLEEVE HYPERCOLOR SHIRT (click the link this is the exact shirt I had) in the tub and ruined it. It never hypercolored again.
When we weren't playing in the pool or loitering in the Dartmouth cafeteria we would explore the area a little bit. There was a lot of cool things to do around there, including going to see The Quechee Gorge. The gorge is massive and makes your head spin just looking at it. The most important thing about it for me as a kid was that it was featured on an episode of Rescue 911.
I got asked to shoot a couple near there in Woodstock, Vermont. The shoot was good, but very rainy. It was at Sugarbush Farm, which seemed like a great place, though we had to rush and hide under things for the most part due to the rain. I'd love to go back for a non-rainy shoot some day.
After the shoot I headed out to the gorge to see how it was doing. My memory of it is that the main viewpoint from the road was big, open, and dangerous. I'm guessing that a lot of people fell/jumped into it. The fencing around it now is intense and I was amused by the little camera holes they cut out of the fence.
The view is still pretty great, though I feel a little bit spoiled after living in the Pacific Northwest for so long. This is New England-impressive.
I walked around a little bit, bought a Quechee beer coozie and then headed out.
After the gorge I headed into Hanover, NH, home of Dartmouth College and did some touristy things. It's a pretty typical (Ivy League) college town. I bought some silly old country records from a store that I think was called "Records and Posters" run by a weird guy who REALLY didn't me tracking rain water in "because it's a struggling small business, you know?" No, I definitely don't know. Down the street I found a used book store called Left Bank Books that was okay. The jewel in the rough was a copy of Joel Sternfeld's Stranger Passing. Not bad.
I'll include more shots from the session I did there (we broke into a tiny, rundown chapel to get away from the rain, don't tell anyone) and another session I did that weekend. My last wedding of the year is coming up on Saturday! Things are going to get pretty lazy around here!
