Fall in New Hampshire

For the past few months, I’ve been living at home in New Hampshire with my parents. While it’s been nice to stay with my family and not have to pay for anything, living in the middle of the woods gets old really quickly. The slow-paced and mundane lifestyle of the countryside is a drastic contrast to the city experience that I’ve had for the past 7 years. It’s tough not having easy access to see my friends, go to trendy bars or restaurants, or hit up museums and other quirky spots.

Life gets stale fast.

But one thing that’s been fun this year has been seeing the fall foliage transition right before my eyes. Since I am surrounded by nature, I get to experience the leaves turning colors on an intimate level. I watch as the green of the summer faded and replaced by the bright orange and yellow of autumn. Even looking out my room right now, the scene is still quite beautiful despite an early fall that’s caused most of the leaves to fall already.

When I lived in Boston, I didn’t often venture out of the city. I lived in urban communities, which meant I rarely saw any foliage since there were barely any trees. My friends would always make plans to drive out to the country and look at the foliage, but these plans would always fall through. Pun intended. So for the past 7 years, I never had a proper countryside foliage tour.

Well that changed this year due to the circumstances. Because of COVID, I have been stuck in the prime spots for foliage, so that worked out in my favor.

My parents and I visited all these local sight-seeing spots and hiking trails in past month, because we live so close to them. We can even walk to some, which my parents did and I refused because I was not about that life.

There were spots we visited for the first time despite driving past them every week. It was cool to experience so much of my community during this period.

One of the more memorable trips we went on was to the White Mountains. I remember going there when I was very little. We drove up in about 40 minutes, so it wasn’t very far.

The photo on the left was taken a few weeks ago. The photo on the right was taken 10 years ago. There are some differences.

So those photos were from the White Mountains. As you can see, the foliage this year looked great. Unfortunately most of the leaves have fallen off already since we have a short Fall this year. Maybe Winter will look nice as well if we get a lot of snow. Though that means I will have to shovel, which is one of the worst things ever.