There's the irritating nuisance of packing and unpacking. And of course, the trip itself which is to say getting there. In our case, driving, and a fairly long, though relatively relaxing drive. Some would scoff and say that six and a half hours of driving isn't much, and that's true in a sense. Long enough for me, though.

And for our two little dogs, though my husband and I are in satisfied agreement that Jackie and Jillie, for all of their just approaching three years of age, travel very well. They're content, actually, to be with us, wherever we happen to be. They mostly sleep, of course. Whenever the truck comes to a stop they're instantly alert and ready to have some kind of adventure.

Hard to say whether they remember two previous occasions -- or is it three? -- when they were with us on our wonderful hikes on mountain and forest trails in the White Mountain Range of New Hampshire. With these two, we no longer climb mountains. They're young, we're not. Our other two little ones did climb mountains, some of them arduous and potentially dangerous. And this, once we ourselves no longer climbed the really big ones. The real challenges were done with our teen-age children. Then came our first two little dogs. And now, 40 years later, these two.

But they adjust fairly quickly to living in the rented cottage for the week we're there, at the Waterville Valley, our jump-off spot to a range of good hiking trails. Because they permit us to bring along our little dogs, we've been frequenting the same place for quite a number of years. Though we aren't able to keep them off-leash for fear of losing one of them, going astray when impulsively leaping after a squirrel, for example, they and we make the most of our leashed hikes.

We see beautiful lakes, venerable trees, mountain landscapes, rivers, waterfalls, and all manner of fascinating natural geological features, not to mention the creatures big and small inhabiting those areas that draw us back to New Hampshire year after year. The trees haven't yet changed colour, though there are always a few that do. All vegetation has started their fall decline, however, and fungi are now visible everywhere on the forest floor on some of these perpetually wet and humid landscapes.

Morning mist and fog envelop the area most mornings until the sun rises and burns it all off. In the interim, everything is drenched in the landscape from the temperature inversion; cool mountain nights and warm days. The long-range weather forecast we had consulted had informed us before we left for our week away that we'd encounter day after day of heavy overcast, rain and thunderstorms. As it happened instead it turned out that we had four days in succession of 80-degree-F, and sunny temperatures.

We did once drive through some rain but it was extremely local, so our hikes were rain-free and comfortable. The day we returned home, re-packing everything including our little dogs, it did rain, heavily at times. We passed through a succession of weather systems; rain, overcast, clearing, sun, then overcast and drizzle. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and parted with our genial hosts with the message that we'd be seeing them again, next year.