Outside H-Town

There are moments in your four years at Dartmouth when you just need to slip away from Hanover, even if only for a moment. Hanover, or "H-Town" as some of us like to call it, is indeed a vibrant place. Dartmouth keeps you occupied 29 hours of every 24 hour day and quite frankly there are moments when this stimulation can be too much.

I had spent the previous week taking midterms, applying for jobs, organizing a History of Coeducation at Dartmouth exhibit, running a million meetings and mostly just exhausting myself. This Saturday was sunny so I decided to take a little vacation, just for the day.

I left everything in H-town and drove 5 miles to Lebanon, New Hampshire and went to Muriel’s Donuts, the Ledges, and Fore-U golf. It was perfect. Muriel’s Donuts is a donut shop that is open from 9:30-12:30 every morning and they ONLY sell donuts. Only. The business is owned by a single couple who has been making donuts for over thirty years on the first floor of their house. You walk in the door into a linoleum room with a sign from 1981 listing the donut options and you place your order at the counter and Ms. Muriel gives you your donuts straight out of hot oil. You have four choices: plain, sugar, cinnamon sugar, or jelly. If you ask for jelly you can watch them inject your donut with red sugar delights right then and there. In case you were wondering (and I know you were), jelly filled donuts are made by skewering your delicious treat with a hollow rod that’s attached to a vat of red sugar jelly and then a button is pushed and TA-DA, a jelly donut. No, I don’t know what happens to that part of the donut the jelly replaces. I think it just disappears.

After we thanked Mr. and Ms. Muriel for the 12 donuts purchased for the bargain price of $3.42, we drove to The Ledges. The Ledges are really just a swimming hole created by a cascading stream on the outskirts of West Lebanon, 8 miles from campus. You park your car on a precarious 2-lane blind curve, walk down a footpath and then sunbath and swim about in a rushing stream that offers a natural waterfall, a delightful cliff for jumping, and a pool just deep enough for landing. We sunned ourselves and braved the freezing water, had a nice chat with a local man who had been coming to the swimming hole all his life and suddenly it was 3 hours later and time for ice cream.

Then we went to Fore-U golf, a driving range/mini-golf/ice cream shop also in West Lebanon and ate “small” ice cream cones 8 inches tall. Again, it was perfect. I returned to campus full of ice cream and donuts, a little sunburned, and completely rejuvenated. You’ll find your time at Dartmouth is very often entirely and completely filled with the thousands of things you do. But you will also find that there are moments when it’s healthy and smart and JUST what you need to put it all aside for an hour or an afternoon and expand your horizons outside H-town.