RainyDayMagazine got a reservation at the Wentworth Inn in Jackson, New Hampshire for a couple of nights.  The rooms on the Inn's website looked fantastic and we were quite excited about checking it out!

We didn't get as early a start as we would have liked, but we managed to get all the gear into the Boxster and got on the road around 11am.  It takes about 2 hours to get there from Boston.  It was a really clear day for the drive so we hoped to shorten the trip a bit by, uh, enjoying the higher MPH available with the Boxster...I just had to make sure the Escort 8500 is on the right setting :-)

On the drive up, we tested out the Tavo gloves for driving, as well as a few of the other non-sport gear related gadgets (Drive+Play, CoPilot GPS). 

This was our first long trip using the CoPilot Live software and the Bluetooth GPS module.  In all our previous tests, we always tested the GPS to see how it would take us to places we already knew how to get to.  This was the first time we relied on the GPS to get us to a destination that we had never been to before.

The software performed amazingly well!  The GPS module was able to lock on to the satellite VERY quickly.  We had no problems switching between the different modes and views.  This was also the first time that we have found the Points of Interest (POI) feature to be useful!  We found the The Station Grill (for lunch) using it, and we never would have found it otherwise :-)

The POI feature was also great for finding out things like "What was that river we just crossed?" or "What is that mountain peak up ahead?"  It was Mount Washington, the place with the highest recorded winds ever.

We ended up making pretty good time up to Jackson.  Access to the town is via this one lane covered bridge. 

All we needed to make this into a fairyland was for it to start snowing :-)

We've decided to do things differently on RainyDaySports in 2006: instead of doing individual FirstUse reviews for each piece of gear, we'll be taking a bunch of gear with us on planned outings and reviewing them as a group.

We have a lot of vendors participating in this first outing (Adidas, Magellan, Tubbs, etc...)!

For the FirstUse report, we'll take all the gear with us up to Jackson's Wentworth Inn on the snowshoeing trip to see how well they perform.

Winter Outing:

1. The Gear

2. Heading to Jackson

3. The Inn

4. The Outing

Related Reviews:

1. 180s (Exhale, ExoLite, Mortise)

2. Addidas Kumasi XCR

3. CamelBak Hydration Pak

4. Columbia Sportswear

5. Dunham Waffle Boots

6. HighGear Compass

7. Kombi Gloves

8. Magellan GPS

9. Tavo Gloves

10. Technica Boots

11. Tubbs Snowshoes

12. UnderArmour Underlayer