We started the day with a continental breakfast consisting of a bowl of warm soy milk, tea, croissants and jam and prosciutto with Belgian mustard on sourdough. This hearty meal was needed as it had to carry us through until lunch at the Mount Washington Resort … a three hour drive north from Dartmouth. The Mount Washington Resort in New Hampshire's White Mountains dates back to 1902. According to Wikipedia, Pennsylvania coal and rail magnate Joseph Stickney built the huge and stately white hotel, employing some 250 Italian artisans to create, among other things, the exceptionally ornate plasterwork that still decorates the lobby, ballroom, and octagonal dining room. Too bad he died only one year after it opened.
‘Recently renovated after falling on hard times, this National Historic Landmark once again lures guests with its 900-foot wraparound verandah, four-course dinners, and full suite of resort facilities, including an 18-hole Donald Ross designed golf course, swimming pools, horseback riding, tennis, skiing and hiking trails.
The resort sits on 2,500 acres in the White Mountain National forest surrounded by a ring of forested (and in winter snow capped) peaks. The tallest of these is directly behind the resort, the 6,288-foot Mt. Washington, New England's loftiest. It is renowned for its windy summit where conditions are more arctic than temperate. In fact the summit of Mt Washington is reputed to have ‘the worst weather in the world’.
In the front of the resort the Ammonoosuc River flows past the main hotel building, separating the knoll it sits on from the meadow beyond’.
‘In 1944, the hotel and the resort made history when the representatives of 44 nations met there for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Known as the Bretton Woods Conference, this historic meeting established the American dollar as the benchmark of international exchange, pegging it to gold at the rate of $35/ounce. The appropriately named ‘Gold Room’ where they met is now cordoned off and except for new carpet looks much as it did then.
That conference also led to the establishment of the International Monetary Fund. During that historic summer, the hotel never opened to outside guests, the U.S. Government having taken it over for the entire season (there was only one other summer, ever since its inception in since 1902, that has the hotel not opened to the public, and that was in 1930 at the height of the Great Depression)’.
In addition to its fame as the birthplace of the IMF the resort is also famous because Rod Laver and a number of other well-known Australians played tennis here in the 1970s for the inaugural Volvo International Tournament.
We had an enjoyable late lunch in the dining room with a view out over the snow covered hills, but it was a long drive home for Dirk. We were quite happy not to have to drive on the slippery road in the falling snow.
Tip for the day – Did you know that when you drop your iPhone 4m from a balcony into 50cms of fresh powdery snow that when it hits the grass underneath it may scoot sideways and therefore not necessarily be at the bottom of the indentation it made when it entered the snow?
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