Captain’s Log… Day 10 (Morning) ~ REDRUM – Mt. View Grand, New Hampshire & New Mainemontshire

I told you I shouldn’t have watched The Shining before I left home. The Mt. View Grand Resort & Spa has as creep factor of 11 on a scale of 1-10. Now, it’s pretty, modernized and welcoming, but I swear…I think there are only 4 people working here and 5 people staying here. The hotel is huge and I made the mistake of looking at the photos of the hotel from the 1800’s until 1955…I swear…that was a Jack Nicholson moment right out of the Shining. I was going to start crying and run, but I had to hold it together for the kids. So, we sat down in the President Eisenhower room and the boys played checkers while I looked at the mountains praying and warding off evil spirits and DD talked on her cell phone. Again, don’t watch the Shining and then take off for a hotel in the mountains that was the understudy for the role in case the actual hotel got sick. Ya know?

To be fair, this is supposed to be a busy spot..when there’s snow. I hate snow, so I’ll probably never know. Also, I hate the drive over here from Maine. It almost erased all the good feelings we had about our trip to the Maine coast, because it was so ugly on the drive from there to New Hampshire. DD and I decided they should cut Maine up and relabel it as a different state. The coast can still be Maine, but let’s dump anything that’s not coast and call it something else, like New Mainemontshire. Then it will be labeled in a way so that we can avoid it by name. As for me, I’m never driving through New Mainemontshire again. I’ll stick to the coast only.

I can’t tell you how many times my life flashed before my eyes on the way here. I was starting to get tired of the rerun, ba dum dah! I crack myself up. Seriously though, 2 words: Logging Trucks. 18 wheelers filled with logs driving like they can make NYC driver turns on a whim. Those guys/gals are a real danger! They’re probably asleep half the time anyway, ’cause the drive is so boring, but more than once I had to dodge them because they were driving down the middle of the road. Everyone else I was driving with seemed to be used to it. They drove hugging the side of the road. I learned and drove there too.

We passed through some depressing towns. Part of our drive took us through the middle of a factory. (Seriously, factory goings on on either side of the road/actually it was partly a bridge, no matter.) Not surprising the factory was taking logs and turning them into mulch, smaller bark stripped logs and some other things that smelled like Mobile, AL, so I’m guessing paper. I can say that we didn’t see a soul fishing from the river that ran through there. I can’t imagine why? Hmmm…

I was so glad to get off the road that I even accepted a night’s lodging in this ginormous spookfest in the mountains. Ok, I have to admit that I noticed a Shining element even when booking the hotel online. Did it have to have one of those creepy gated elevators? Did DS#1 have to be doing a finger puppet thing and talking in a weird voice in our room? Um, he’s never done that before. I had to ask him to stop due to an intense scare factor.

We’re surrounded by mountains and some smattering of eateries somewhere way down the road…too far for me to reach last night. So, we did the room service thing. Hey, it’s not like we had options! What was delivered was the worst food of our trip. There was even a little gnat on my lettuce leaf. I don’t even want to discuss the flavors, or lack of them. I will give them a high thumbs up for delivering the 3 glasses of milk (1 diet coke over ice) and plate of chocolate chip cookies to our door at the time I requested when I made the request with the concierge three weeks ago. That’s impressive. Also, the large part of my dining last night was chocolate chip cookies, due to the unsavory aspect of my ordered meal. So, thank goodness for my advanced planning.

The big hits of this hotel are: (duh) the mountain view (FANTASTIC) and the indoor pool. We made use of the pool last night and the kids really enjoyed it. There’s a cool nature themed mural on the walls at the pool complete with some hide and seek hidden pictures. I found a list of all the items to search for sitting on a table near the pool. We had a good time finding those when not swimming or in a jacuzzi. All hail the jacuzzi.

Plus, they have like 300 films you can choose to watch in their theater. The Front Desk told us we could pick anything and sit in their leather reclining chairs to view the movie, because no one else had requested anything. (That’s because no one is here…creepy.) We were too tired though.

Frankly, I think this part of the trip is all Stephen King’s fault. He did some kind of voodoo mojo to us yesterday.