Much as we enjoyed ourselves away from home for a week - and it is indisputable that we did enjoy ourselves - we're glad to be home again. It's always so striking when we've been away even for so short a time how, when we're back home exposed once again to everything familiar that we're taken by surprise, seeing the familiar in a different way. Everything just looks different, and it takes a few minutes to completely recall familiarity. We saw it even in little Riley, who adjusts very well to new environments as long as he's with us, who, on our return home, sought to familiarize himself once again within his slightly 'unfamiliar' surroundings. Confirming, one might suppose, just how deeply engrained within us habit tends to be in our psychological comfort.

Sleeping in our very own bed was an absolute and quite wonderful re-adjustment. It's difficult to return to sleeping in what was once called a 'double' bed, when you've been long accustomed to the comfort, width and breadth of a Queen-sized bed by comparison. Our own linen was appreciated. Even though at the cottage we're provided with a daily change of towels, our own are preferred. As is our double shower, when we can shower together. The poky-sized rooms of a cottage cannot compare to the pleasure taken in more spacious chambers, like our own.

And although it will always be a superb experience to look out at the mountains surrounding the cottage, and the forests and the changing aspect of the sky in such a tremendously different geology, at home we have our gardens to offer us pleasure, and the nearby wooded ravine to provide us with leisure outdoor activity. Apart from comparing, needless to say, hiking in the mountains represents an activity dear to our hearts. It is odd, however, how infrequently we sight any wildlife of any type or size, in the White Mountain range. Once, years ago, a juvenile black bear, once, at a distance, a deer, another time even more distant, a moose; the most we can ever hope for appears to be red squirrels and chipmunks and even they are in short supply. The area is not a flyway, and bird sightings common enough at home, remain uncommon there but for the spring.

We had a late morning walk in the ravine off our street earlier today, in a light drizzle. It is surprisingly cooler here than it was in the Waterville Valley. Most of the ravine's canopy has fallen; some of the maples and the beech are still hoisting their colourful flags of yellow, red and copper, but the greater aggregate litters the forest floor. We have red, black and grey squirrels in abundance and they greeted our peanut handouts with huge enthusiasm as we ambled along. There was a noisy vee formation of Canada geese overhead, wending their long way south in anticipation of winter. And up in an old pine where we occasionally spot them -- or rather generations of them -- there were two juvenile raccoons, watching as we gained one of the hills on our woodland ramble.

Photographing a mountain stream heading for the Pemigawasset River, Basins Cascade, Franklin Notch