I was out and about on the roads today, traveling from Lake Winnipesaukee down to Manchester to visit my dear brother in his new digs. He and his missus moved into a new apartment there, leaving the city of Concord where they had lived for over 20 years. They got a good deal on the new place and were now closer to both my oldest nephew and his family as well as his In-Laws.
It was a nice place, and it suited them well. But that isn’t the subject of this post. It is the observations I made while driving to and from their place I want to post about.
I had mentioned in a post sometime back in November about making a trip to a friend’s home in the southern part of the state to help him raise some new antennas for his amateur radio station. One of the things I noticed was how fast everyone was driving. I stuck to the slow lane on the trip down and back, driving at 75mph or faster and I was being passed by everyone. I thought it might have been just a weekend thing, particularly since it was a holiday weekend. But I was wrong.
Just as I had back then, I stuck to the slow lane and was traveling around 70mph and was getting passed by just about everyone. At least this time traffic wasn’t nearly as heavy as it was the previous time, but traffic was moving well above the posted limit – 65mph. My motivation for staying in the slower lane was to keep my fuel consumption lower than it otherwise would have been, particularly in light that I had just paid $4.20 a gallon to fuel up the trusty RAM and wanted to keep my fuel economy above 20 miles per gallon. I did succeed, averaging about 21 mpg for the entire trip.
Another thing I noticed was just how much of the snow cover was gone, with some small remnants of large snowbanks still visible here and there around Lake Winnipesaukee but all signs gone once I was about 10 miles south of there. Gone. I didn’t see any snow on the larger parking lots or along the roads. I didn’t see any in the shaded area of the woods that line the roads we were on. It was gone.
Another sign that winter was losing its grip was the amount of open water seen on Lake Winnipesaukee. There wasn’t a whole lot of open water on Friday, but there was a lot to be seen this afternoon. It looked like most of the ice was gone from the southern shores of the lake though we could still see quite a bit of ice in the center of the lake and along the northern shore. With the warmer weather and the wind today, I wasn’t surprised to see how much the ice had receded. It’s going to be warm tomorrow, though not as warm as today. But there will be rain on and off throughout the day Sunday. If it keeps up, I expect most of the ice will be gone before the end of this coming week.
And speaking of the ice being gone soon, I have already made arrangements to rent the same slip I have over the past 20 years and to get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of storage and ready to launch sometime in early May. The ice is already gone from the cove where I dock the boat.
And so it goes…
