Our first day in New Hampshire on the 2nd of June was cold and wet. It was 8:00 pm before we were completely settled in, unpacked, shopping for the week's food  finished, and Jackie and Jillie fed. And then we had our own late-night meal. Beyond which we hadn't much energy and decided that 9:30 was a fine time to go straight to bed. Jackie and Jillie agreed, with their usual enthusiasm.  We were all tired and needed a good rest. 

Just before dusk, soon after our return from Hannaford's supermarket, we heard what sounded like a telephone ringing. Frogs' spring serenade, that's what it was, and we heard them in the forest behind the cottage at around that same time, falling dusk, every evening thereafter. 

An early bedtime deserves an early morning rise, and we settled for 7:30 am. The routine then ensued; first off, taking Jackie and Jillie for a stroll around the grassy compound that held the cottage we would be staying in for the week. We took the measure of the day; cool, overcast, wet. But as long as there was no heavy rain we'd make the most of the day.

Time to shower, feed the puppies and prepare our own breakfast. All at a leisurely pace. The cottage kitchen is well equipped with full refrigerator and stove, coffee maker, toaster, pots and pans. Despite which we tend to bring along our own utensils; plunger coffee pot, coffee grinder, tea kettle, teapot, and a few pots and pans, along with a set of knives and cutlery. It's why things get rather complicated, hauling so much around with us beyond necessity.

We cleaned up and Irving did the vacuuming. We've been coming to this cottage for many years and our hosts know we like to use a vacuum so there's always one awaiting us in the cottage. We had, in fact, bought a vacuum cleaner ages ago and left it there. 

Our destination for the day would be our favourite trail; Smartsbrook, where area mountain streams pour down mountainsides into the Pemigewasset River. Smartsbrook had been heavily logged out decades ago when we first came across it, and the result was a real shocker. Since then, the pines that had been deemed too immature to harvest have grown thick and tall. We've always noticed the predominance of hemlock and yellow birch, as well as spruce and maple, with moose maple and dogwood in the forest understory.

It's a picturesque trail, and so is the mountain stream, boulder-strewn and thunderous. Since the area had experienced quite a lot of recent rain there was no dearth of water tumbling over the erratics and into the gorge formed by aeons of water streaming down mountainsides. At one time we could be assured of seeing plentiful beautiful Ladies Slippers in bloom especially along an adjoining trail further upstream, Pine Flats. Every year there has been a diminishing number of those lovely orchids, and now we see mostly straw lilies.

The trails were sodden, but we've seen them much wetter at this time of year. It's a steady uphill climb negotiating root ladders and rocks and boulders but the effort taken has its rewards in the microlandscapes, one after another. We took our time, occasionally leaving the trail to move closer to the stream, marvelling at the striated, black-and-red granite and the depth of the stream as we ascended. Up to the last time we had visited three years ago we would hike the entire trail, leaving Pine Flats to enter the forest interior for a much longer trail commitment. This time, on our 76th wedding anniversary, we felt the need to pace ourselves, and turned back when we reached the end of the Pine Flats trail.