I was packed and ready to go at 5 o’clock in the morning. I didn’t think there would be many people flying at 5 o’clock on Sunday morning. Wrong. The place was packed.

Going through airport security, I had my first experience with a body scanner. I’ve heard of these things. They can see through your clothes like Superman. I didn’t know how long it took or whether to hold my breath like for an X-ray. Before I could blink, it was over and the security guard was telling me, “Come on out, lady.”

The flight to Philly was fine except for a gabby lady across the aisle that didn’t shut up for the entire flight. The connection from Philly was delayed. After all the planning we had done to coordinate flights and get to New Hampshire at the same general time as my sister and brother-in-law, we spent two hours waiting, and wouldn’t you just know it, listening to another gabby lady who talked endlessly on a cell phone – one call after another. She must have called everyone she knew.

When we finally got to New Hampshire, I spotted a large bronze moose in the airport that reminded me of article I wrote called “What to do with a Brass Moose.” I didn’t think of putting it at the airport to amuse the tourists. I wanted to take a picture and my sister said “Go ahead as it will probably be only moose we see.” It seems she once looked for moose for an entire vacation in Canada and never did see any, even though other people saw them walking the streets of downtown.

We were all starving as we had been traveling all day. We didn’t know which restaurant was a good place to eat, so we decided we would go to one with a cute name. We decided on “The Muddy Moose.” Bad choice. With my sister’s luck at finding moose, we couldn’t find the restaurant. However, we did find one called “Horsefeathers” and figured that was cute enough.

The next day was rainy; in fact every day was rainy with clouds and mist hanging on the mountains. We decided to do an auto tour of the mountains and check out the foliage. The leaves were gorgeous, all shades of yellow, gold, orange and red. A lot of maple trees grow there, which probably accounts for the beautiful colors. It was a tossup as to which color was prettier, but it would be hard to find anything more glorious than a red maple.

New Hampshire has a lot of waterfalls, dozens. It quit raining long enough for us to walk a trail to a waterfall that was supposed to be only a half mile away. The more we walked, the further away the waterfall became. I know we walked 5 miles. There was a breathtaking cascading falls at the end of the trail. That was the good part. The bad part is that we then had to walk back to the car. I was really feeling sorry for myself until we met up with an old lady on a walker who was hiking the trail.

We found other waterfalls that you could see without having to hike, though, and so many gorgeous vistas with mountains, lakes, and fall leaves of all colors that our eyes were sore from looking. The color was at its peak and we decided that nothing could possibly be any grander than this or we would find that we had died and gone to heaven.

I always thought that heaven had only clouds, but my sister insisted that heaven has trees. We never did decide. I guess we will have to wait and see. I don’t know if there are any moose in heaven either; however, I do know that there are no moose in New Hampshire, at least none that we ever saw.

Copyright 2012 Sheila Moss

Today is the first column in a series about a trip I took to New England. I hope you will get a few smiles as well as enjoy the image of a colorful fall.