But when I thought this would be a nice quiet summer, puttering and pecking away at finishing the house, joining the Green Mountain Clubbers for a few easy hikes, and paddling the local ponds with Mother, I was mistaken. The jobs I fell into about the time I retired from the building and remodeling business have lately occupied almost as much time as that did. The producer of our television show has had our crew hopping from the coast of Maine to the summits of New Hampshire, and from the Connecticut River to the remote ponds of northern Maine. Just getting my body ready for those jaunts has entailed a lot of gym time and power-walking (or at least, at my age and state of decrepitude, what passes for it). But both the getting ready and the actual doing it have been very enjoyable.

About a week or so ago I strung two disparate and geographically separated adventures into a solid five days. On Monday I drove east to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. I’m still tickled at how much faster I can get to the three great White Mountain notches – Franconia, Crawford, and Pinkham – from central Vermont than I could from our old home in Etna. And there are reliable watering holes on the way to all three, each marked with a pair of golden arches beside the road.

Our doughty producer had gotten the crew a night at the recently renovated Mount Washington Hotel. Very nice. Its owners have spent millions to convert it to a year-round resort. A brand-new conference center and spa now graces the east side of one wing, facing Mount Washington. An outdoor swimming pool beside the Ammonoosuc River is open all winter, and the roof of the center is “green” – a rock garden of plants native to the mountain. We dined elegantly in the main dining room (jacket required), amid crystal chandeliers and Tiffany clerestory windows.

But this wasn’t a food critic’s trip. We were there to experience and film one of the hotel’s new features, a canopy tour. I’d never heard of such a thing, but had heard that it might involve flying though space on a wire. Sure enough; a canopy tour is a series of zip wires, suspension bridges, and rappels threading through the tops of the trees and descending the side of Mount Rosebrook, across the river from the hotel. A pair of serious guides saw us into body harnesses and explained a few features of the tour. Then it was off up the mountain on a quad ski lift.

There was an easy practice wire where we learned how to start and stop; the harnesses roll on two pulleys on a pair of wires, and you arrest at the end of each descent by pressing down on one wire with the flat of one hand (behind the pulley, as I learned the hard way). The longest, highest, most anticipated zip is 830 feet long and 150 feet in the air as it crosses a glade. We filmed with three different cameras, ended the afternoon satisfied we’d done a day’s work, and parted from our guides – who’d lightened up as we descended the mountain – with relieved, appreciative hugs.

Next day Mother and I drove west in steamy weather, crossed Lake Champlain on the temporary ferry at Chimney Point, and drove down the west shore of Lake George to the YMCA Silver Bay Conference Center. Nestled into a narrow strip between Route 9N and the lake, it looked, when we drove in, like a Robert Altman movie set – people and kids moving everywhere, swimming, playing tennis and basketball, sailing, sitting in deck chairs on the hotel verandah.

It’d been a long time since I’d been in a YMCA milieu, but it felt like putting on a comfortable pair of old gloves: mildly evangelical, no alcohol or ice machines in the inn, some guests who’d been coming for many decades, and everybody friendly! We were there to give a talk about the Society’s Arctic canoe trips and the meals that Mother packages up for them. But it was also Family Week and “Emp Week.” Emps, we learned, are former summer employees, who remain fiercely loyal to and deeply nostalgic about the place, It was like a family reunion. As dusk fell, the Woods Tea Company performed their unique lighthearted music outdoors, while gnats hummed around our heads and the running lights of power boats moved slowly by out on the lake.

After our lecture the following morning, Mother drove off to the discount mall south of Lake George Village, and I tackled a 1.75-mile trail to Jabez Pond, a mountain tarn on adjoining Forest Preserve land. Within the first 200 yards I remembered a diagram from my 1953 Physical Geology textbook of a phenomenon called horst and graben. The Lake George basin is a graben – a long slab of rock that’s dropped down between two parallel faults, whose other sides rear up quite steeply – like, in the case of the Jabez Pond Trail, 1000 feet in a little more than a mile. It felt as though my back wheels had fallen off. But I had a great map with lots of way points, and was back in time to shower, change, and trek over to the kitchen for ice before Mother returned. Scrabble after supper in one of the few air-conditioned rooms, a pleasant night with the humidity dropping as a cold front blew in, and a leisurely trip home the next day through the village in the mountains where we started married life over half a century ago. Not too shabby, as weeks go.