Yay! Today is Mount Washington Day 3! And my mom is here, Gramma Kay. She arrived Thursday night, and I spent Friday getting the new car ready for the trip.  We got up at 5 AM, as usual, and hit the road but 6:02.  We stopped at the store in Danville and go some sandwich meats and a bunch of breakfast sandwiches.

An Uneventful Trip was had by all.  At Twin Mountain, I was right.  The last time we were there there was a short section of track on the corner, at a decent incline.  I suspected it was for a display of one of the old steam engines from the Cog, and sure enough, this time there was one parked there. It was painted in the classic Red-Green-Gold scheme, the boiler had an unrealistic satin black paint and it had one of the older passenger cars in front of it.

We got to the Auto Road just in time, got our packet and had the one last pit stop before driving on up the side.  The new turbo Volvo did just fine.  It was nice to be at Hairpin again.  It was too windy to be outside for any length of time, even though the air temp was a balmy 56˚.

We had the bicycles in droves again.  The winner made it in 50 minutes and 47 seconds.

Bicycle race up Mount Washington at Hairpin Turn.

A lovely day.  One guy was reported by radio as not being in good shape, and sure enough he arrived at Hairpin with a cramp on the top side of his lower thigh as large as a softball! And while he was stretching that out, we had the obligatory fall-over by one guy that was going too slow.  His high-tech pedal clips prevented him from getting a foot out in time and he was under the bike for a bit trying to get a foot off the pedals.

They’re dropping like flies!

It was interesting to see the pro bikers from the amateurs.  It was obvious by how they tackled the hairpin.  The pros took the outside of the curve, where it was less steep.  The amateurs took the inside of the curve, ‘because it is shorter’, but much, much steeper.

Finally the race was over and we headed up to the summit. We had lunch in the parking lot and wandered through the summit building. Next we went out to look at the trains.  Audrey wanted to crush some coins and all we had were dimes.  So she put 30 cents on the tracks for the down-bound double header to roll over. We found two.  One of them had been stuck to the wheel and were rolled over several times.

Gramma Kay and the kids search for crushed dimes.

Next I went up to the roof and got out my HT.  I love using my 5 watt HT with the long-whip +9dB antenna to se how far I can go.  I got into the Mount Equinox repeater and had a ragchew with a fellow way down by Saratoga Spring, NY.  And then I thought I was working the Essex Jct repeater, but it was actually one on the same frequency in Bangor, Maine! I was up there for about 45 minutes.

Lastly we went to the summit, the kids love sitting on the USGS marker there, on the actual summit.  I took a photo of a guy at the sign on his Samsung brand tablet.

Gramma Kay and Olivia on the summit marker.

I was thinking that the long, long line of people waiting to get to the sign would be well served by a staff person taking their pictures on their own cameras.  But there’s no money in that, so…

And finally, on the way down, I erected my video camera through the sunroof while Kay drove.  Was it two years ago that Kay drove up the mountain and I recorded that? Well now it was time for the down-bound trip.  It’s about 20 minutes each direction. I was in the middle of the back seat contorted so that I could see the pop-out monitor. It wasn’t that easy, but I think the shot is nice.  We had to stop about 3/4 the way down to change batteries.  And we passed a little convertible that had driven off the edge of the road. It’s right front wheel was hanging off. The Road Crew is there for exactly that.

I got a shot of the sign at the base saying ‘you may not appreciate this driving experience.’

We had sandwiches at the Italian joint in Goreham, Saladino’s, and Canollis, of course. It’s become a tradition now to stop there and have some great food.