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Winter doesn’t officially start until December 21st, but we’re nearly there and we found ourselves drawn to the river this afternoon. Normally this would be a hard decision, but temperatures in the 50’s made it a little easier to justify.
We found this Great Blue Heron hunting in the shallows by Honeypot Hill in Stow.
After an afternoon of chasing rainbows we headed off to Brownfield, Maine for what we knew would be a stirring night of music and fun.
Yes, it’s another evening at the Stone Mountain Arts Center.
Where else do you get:
Traditional Christmas carols…
Holiday show tunes…
Ave Maria sung in the original German by a world-renown opera singer…
A cautionary tale featuring a rather inebriated Disco Santa sung to the tune of the Animals “House of the Rising Sun”…
Wonderful piano and instrumental arrangements (The Stone Mountain Boys and also Dana Cunningham)…
And, yes, toe-tapping Holiday Bluegrass?
Three shows. All sold out. We managed to score tickets to the middle show. We had a great dinner before the show and watched as the room filled to capacity.
Carol had, pardon the pun, decked the hall with trees and lights providing a warm holiday feel to the entire center.
Carol and Jeff’s extraordinary vision and gamble appears to be really paying off.
The Stone Mountain Arts Center, in just a few months, has gone from a renovated barn to a thriving entertainment center that thrills both the audience and the artists alike.
Shows are selling out months in advance. And this is a place that most people driving there for the first time say “this can’t be right”.
The only thing missing was the snow.
Check out a full gallery of photos hiding away on my web site: Stone Mountain Christmas Gallery
We were in New Hampshire and Maine this weekend for the first annual Stone Mountain Christmas Show. We’ve headed up to the foothills of the White Mountains for several years now for the ancestor of this event - Carol Noonan’s Christmas Concert at the Little White Church in Eaton, NH.
Usually we stay at the Inn at Crystal Lake, but we didn’t get our reservations in soon enough. Tim and Bobby were kind enough to point out another inn in Chocurua: The Riverbend Inn. The inn is, not surprisingly, at a bend of the Chocurua River. Sadly there wasn’t any snow (indeed we debated opening the windows for the night) - but it was a quiet yet convenient place to stay for a couple of nights.
We drove up Friday night (in the fog) and planned to do some random photography on Saturday before the show. The weather, for a change, cooperated with some dynamic skies. We were headed towards Center Harbor when it started to drizzle and the sun was peeking through the clouds. I instantly remarked that there should be a rainbow behind us. We’re never headed in the right direction. Sure enough, 42 degrees off the antisolar point it was there. Little did we know the show that was to come…
We came upon a nice landscape with a gentle rainbow arcing up from it. It was fading in and out as the weather and wind kept things constantly changing. I wish I had a slightly higher vantage point and I would have been thrilled to get a nice reflection… No such luck.
We headed into Moultonborough to visit a quirky little country store there and when we came out we saw the rainbow behind a tree in the front of the public library. I ran and grabbed my camera, but was gone by the time I came back - only to reappear a few minutes later. Meanwhile, Betsy had scoped out another vantage point by the town building. A few minutes later the sky, sun, and rain created one of the most intense rainbows I’ve ever seen — including the fainter “double rainbow” — which had me scrambling for my 16mm lens.
I’m not sure how many fender-benders this caused, but people were lining up in parking lots and pulling off the road to witness this wonderful show of nature. Betsy and I travelled around the area a bit hoping for some better views, but none were to be found.
The ephemeral nature of rainbows makes them all that more enjoyable to see and they were a quite a challenge to photograph.
