Financial Times article on Winni

[winnipiseogee]

I was shocked to see this article in London's version of the Wall St Journal.

While its cool that even folks that far away appreciate how special this place is it makes me worry how many new tourists will show up next year!

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/566dd...teedition=intl

[dickiej]

I can't seem to access the article without subscribing......

[winnipiseogee]

You lose the pictures but here is the article....

If my husband Ash had his way, there would only have been hammocks — and the Appalachian Trail. Instead, here we were on the edge of a lake with six Ikea bags bulging with food, wine, books and bedsheets, while a large motorboat was lowered into the water. “All we’d have needed for the Trail was a trowel to dig a hole for a toilet,” Ash said. “Precisely,” I said.

We’d both wanted rustic. But while Ash’s idea of rustic involved cajoling our six-year-old son into walking 10 miles a day, my idea — I’d believed — was much simpler. I wanted the perfect cabin on a lake — something for which I’d been yearning a decade or more. Nine years ago, I set off to Maine in search of my dream cabin and wrote about it in these pages. It should have “pine trees down to the water’s edge; a higgledy-piggledy wooden jetty with an old canoe tied up”, I wrote. I didn’t find it — or at least I did, but only on the last day, and other people were staying in it. This year I was determined we would find a dream cabin and actually holiday in it.

I’m not the only one with a thing about cabins. Growing numbers of travel agents and holiday rental companies now specialise in them (see Canopyandstars.com, Cabinly.co.uk and Glampinghub.com), while sites such as Cabinporn.com exist purely so that stressed citydwellers can stare at photos of rural dwellings and dream of escape.

New England, with its many miles of lakefront, is the natural home of cabins — not just because the first settlers built theirs here but also because it’s where 19th-century philosopher and author Henry David Thoreau had his cabin on a lake and wrote the dream into existence.

With three weeks to go until the date of our vacation, I clicked on a link and found myself staring at the perfect cabin. It was a traditional A-frame style, on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire — the lake where Mitt Romney has his (not-so-rustic) holiday home — and it was available. There were pine trees down to the water’s edge. A wooden dock, as I now knew to call it. I peered closely. No old canoe, but the dock did tilt drunkenly to one side. “Is there WiFi?” I emailed the owner. “No,” he replied, “and no TV. And you have to bring your own drinking water.” “Perfect,” I said. “I’ll take it.”
And then an email came back: “Folks sometimes miss that it’s on an island. Did you? You need a powerboat to get here. Or be a very strong swimmer.”
This, as it turned out, was not the end of it. To drive the powerboat — which costs more to rent than the cabin itself — we needed to obtain temporary boating licences, for which we had to sit a 25-minute exam. But by this time there was no way I was not staying in this cabin.

As we drove from our home in New Haven, Connecticut, to pick up the boat near Moultonborough, New Hampshire, with our son and his older cousin in the back, I read The Boater’s Guide of New Hampshire for the second time. Ash flicked begrudgingly through the booklet in 20 minutes and pronounced this enough. As it turned out, it was.

This was fortunate. Because by the time we’d sat the exam, passed (for the record, I scored higher) and been handed the keys to a beautiful 20ft Bowrider at Trexler’s, a family-run marina on Lake Winnipesaukee with an impressive range of watercraft, I was nervous about driving the boat. “Watch out for rocks,” said Scott Trexler, the owner, looking at me uncertainly. He gave us a map — and a price list of nautical replacement parts. A new outboard motor was upwards of $6,000. He looked at me again, then decided to send his son Quin ahead to guide us.

We loaded both boats with our paraphernalia and chugged into open water. Soon we were rushing across the lake, the water dazzling in the early evening sun. Other boats and jet skis chalked white greetings around us. We slammed hard on their passing wakes. And suddenly we were grinning at one another, delighted with the spray and the wind and the madness of it all. Thank God for 190-horsepower engines, I said to myself, just as I turned to see an Ikea bag with not enough in it fly off the back.

Winnipesaukee is the third-largest lake in New England, dotted with some 250 islands, half of which are little more than rocky outcrops of a quarter-acre or less, even those often proudly boasting a “camp”, as they call the holiday homes around here. Like so many New England towns and rivers, the islands have lovely names — Bear Island, Little Bear, Whortleberry, Rattlesnake, Mink. Ours, Cow Island, was one of the larger ones. “Molly’s Camp”, as our cabin was named, after a favourite aunt, was tucked out of sight in a private cove it shared with one other house. Across the water was Ragged Island, a sanctuary for loons, a type of diving bird. The concertmaster of the Boston Symphony Orchestra used to live on Ragged, our cabin’s owner told us, and in the old days you could hear him making music with the loons at night, their haunting cries mingling with the notes of his piano as they drifted across the water.

We followed Quin through the “Six Pack”, a narrow channel between black- and-red markers, then through the “Hole in the Wall” between Bear and Little Bear, and soon we were skirting Cow, its shore rocky and wild. Even Quin took time finding our cove — and a safe channel through the rocks. Suddenly Molly’s Camp revealed itself between the pine trees, its wraparound deck complete with requisite rocking chairs, the cove itself a serene lily pond. It was everything it was supposed to be. Inside, old wooden skis hung over the windows. An umbrella stand sprouted fishing gear. A magnificent caribou head — shot in Alaska by the owner’s father-in-law — eyed us morosely. There was a day bed, heaped with blankets and cushions, all checks and 1950s ticking. A ladder-style staircase led to a mezzanine floor where children’s bunks were tucked into alcoves beneath the eaves.

We began the next day by crashing the boat on the rocks. It happened on our way to Nineteen Mile Bay. There was a loud bang and a nasty jolt. We carried on, somewhat slower, trying not to think about the price of replacement parts. At Nineteen Mile Bay we ate Moose Tracks ice-cream and bought fishing bait, and spent the rest of the day spearing worms on to hooks and dangling them into the water at the end of our dock. Fish appeared, as if eager to be caught. We hooked plenty and threw back all but one, a wide-mouthed bass, which we slapped on a rock, walloped over the head, then scaled. Then we rushed back to the cabin for a quick YouTube video on How To Gut A Fish. Even Thoreau went home for apple pie.


Susan Elderkin’s son sitting in the cabin, beneath a caribou head
In time we got better at avoiding rocks. We used the boat to explore a different island, or town, each day. We docked at Ragged and came back with handfuls of blueberries for the next morning’s pancakes. And one day we dropped anchor in the deep, cold middle of the lake and dived off the boat. But usually we found ourselves wanting to stay close to home, to lie on the sun-warmed boards of our dock and not do much at all. Our son bounded barefoot over the moss and pine needles — the springiest of carpets — and whittled a bow and arrows from twigs. His cousin lay on her tummy and stared down into the startlingly clear water, watching for a big fish. We hung our camping hammocks by the water’s edge and read, the peace broken only by the hammering of a woodpecker, the scampering of a chipmunk and the occasional gleeful “Yiiiiip!” of a water-skier. Every now and then an arrow flew a hair’s breadth from our cheeks in a perfect arc.

One day we woke up and felt a shift in the air. The lake was squid-ink black. It began to rain and we retreated inside. Soon the rain was coming down in rods, but we didn’t mind. We lit the wood-burning stove, played board games, taught ourselves knots. This is it, I suddenly thought. The cabin dream. I asked my son if he’d like to live here all year round and his face lit up. I looked for Ash and spotted him peeing on a rock in the rain, a sure sign of contentment. It’d taken some work, but we’d found rustic.

When the rain stopped I stepped out on to the deck. The smell of pine needles filled the air. From across the water came the unmistakable cry of a loon, my first in nine years — a cross between an owl and a distant elephant trumpet. “We are still here,” it seemed to say. “We are still here.”

[ApS]

Originally Posted by winnipiseogee

You lose the pictures but here is the article....

There is a photo of their docked boat, but the most interesting picture was of "Molly's Camp" itself.

Originally Posted by winnipiseogee

"...While its cool that even folks that far away appreciate how special this place is it makes me worry how many new tourists will show up next year...!"

No worries—renters use the weekends to pack or unpack, so weekdays on the water will be unaffected.



.

[8gv]

A sentiment very well captured in her writing.