Shaker Village

Today was the first day of our "mini-vacation" or our "stay-cation" as the media is calling it. Supposedly people are staying close to home this year because of gas prices so they've come up with this idiotic name for it. Somehow our "staycation" cost us a half tank of gas already! Anyway, we went up to Enfield, NH to the Shaker Village. It's something Hubby has been wanting to do for a while. The drive was about 1 1/2 hours - straight highway. The weather was absolutely gorgeous (for once!). The "village" was only a couple of houses for us to look at....not at all like Sturbridge Village. The main building was this enormous house the Shakers had built that housed a lot of people. They were kind of like a commune....all lived and worked together and produced everything for the benefit of the whole community. The most bizarre thing I found out about them was that they were completely celibate! They believed everything they did should not be "of the world" but only for God. They kept the community going by taking in converts and also by adopting orphans! Needless to say, they've died out now.....last we heard there were only two old ladies left somewhere in NH. Right beside the Shaker building was a beautiful church built by the Nuns of the Order of LaSallette, who bought the property after the Shakers died out. Pretty weird to see the two buildings side by side.....and connected to each other in the back! Inside the chapel were some gorgeous mosaics. This one is of the Last Supper. I'd like to do a mosaic on our coffee table someday.After seeing the village, Hubby really wanted to take us canoeing, but we could not find a place that rented canoes. The lake the Shaker Village was on was huge....you would have thought there'd be a place to rent them. We did stop at a campground that had on their website that they let the campers use the canoes, but they couldn't seem to find the guy who could open the office to let us rent a canoe, so we left. We stopped at another place that advertised Maple Syrup, just to ask if the person knew where we could rent. He was very much the old-fashioned New Englander who stopped his work to chat with us and was all ready to offer us his nephew's canoe. We ended out leaving and going to a State Park so we could at least have a swim. We went to Wadleigh State Park. It was very pretty, Kezor Lake nestled into the mountains. We stayed there and swam, read and ate our picnic lunch. On the way home we stopped at Winslow State Park just to see what it was like. You drove halfway up the side of Mount Kearsage. It was very pretty up there....they had picnic tables and fireplaces for a picnic. It'd be a great place for our family outing! We could have hiked all the way to the top and climbed the fire tower.....but we didn't. The view from the top was spectacular.