Travel Thursdays: Inflatable Bar Time in New Hampshire

After hanging out with sister and a bunch of other cool folks in Boston, Sara, Liz, Micha, and I picked up a rental car and made our way up to New Hampshire, with promises of a relaxing week at a peaceful lake house (Liz's) ahead of us.

Sara, very excited for her first American road trip!

Oh, you bet your ass we stopped at that massive New Hampshire liquor store on the side of the freeway to stock up. For both the lake house and home.

You don't see things like this driving through Germany, let me tell ya...

The funny part about renting our car is that this time, we had learned from our previous experience of booking the smallest size car only to find out that it didn't even fit our two bags, let alone Liz's and Natalie's (that being our previous trip to New Hampshire from Boston for a whirlwind weekend of Alyssa and Erik's kickass wedding), and so we very proudly booked a bigger size and patted ourselves on the back. Not much bigger, but quite bigger and a Jeep. Cuz when in the US, rent an SUV, am I right?

Well, after about an hour of waiting in line, we finally go through the process of refusing three extra kinds of insurance (that we'd already booked anyway) and the woman asks us how many people will be driving in the car. When we say four, she looks at the reservation and says matter-of-factly, "If you all have bags, the car will definitely be too small." Now at this point, we were rather skeptical because we can fit four people and luggage comfortably into Micha's MINI at home. We decided to chance it - who wants to pay more without even first testing the trunk - and go out and find this bad boy waiting for us:

Umm, yeah, that thing is nearly dwarfing the house. It wasn't a massive SUV of any sorts (it was some kind of Ford), but you could have fit at least five suitcases in that trunk and still and room to stick a couple children in there. If that's your kinda thing. (Needless to say, I picked this one because he was Dodger blue, like my old car, Stella.) So the moral of the story here is, rental car people are full of crap. And American cars are always big enough. :)

We nicknamed the car "the boat" because he certainly looked like he could have fared well on the open seas, and also certainly had enough room to keep us all warm and dry if it came to that.

And now we get to the fun part: our arrival at Lake Squam. After about three hours of driving and stops at the liquor store, the local farm, and the grocery store to load up on supplies and ensure we wouldn't really have to leave the house again if we didn't want to, we arrived here.

In a place we came to call perfection and pretty much never wanted to leave. I think we were all (except Liz, obviously) expecting: a smaller house, a smaller lake, many more neighbors, and a lot less tranquility. Man, it sometimes feels completely awesome to be wrong...

Sara was the only one of us to brave the water that first day - it was super chilly and rather cloudy when we arrived - but we'd already been resigned to the fact that fall had begun - since it had in Berlin - and were perfectly content with chilling in warm clothes on the dock and in the house lazily for the next five days.

That's Micha's happy face

I enjoy gesticulating wildly in Liz's company

Where he spent a whole lot of his time, away from the flock of crazy ladies

We blew up our inflatable bar anyways and hoped for the best, weather-wise. Micha and I had brought it all the way over from Germany, after all.

Oh, we're ready

And the next day, something amazing happened. Well, first Abby arrived. And that in and of itself is awesome cuz she's super fun. But after that, even more amazingness happened in the form of sun and a completely windless sky and heat!

No more sweaters necessary!

And so logically, then this happened:

And we pretty much didn't leave there for the next four days. Except to refill, but of course.

You think I kid, but we had such incredibly perfect weather the entire time that we literally spent 3-4 hours a day in our seats with the bar in one hand, a red cup (we eventually graduated to real wine glasses) full of wine in the other.

It was truly meant to be. This little semi-spontaneously planned but long-talked-about vacation completely made up for the fact that summer in Berlin this year was a complete bust.

And oh, we'll be repeating this. Pretty much every year until eternity in the form of Mandatory Adult Summer Camp. MASC for short. Two weeks. Every summer. Adults only. And the only acceptable forms of activity are: doing nothing, imbibing, and laughing. Who's in?