SUNAPEE HARBOR — Michael Connors, who is 2, honked the horn of an old-fashioned fire truck parked at the Sunapee Farmers Market held in an empty lot on Main Street on Saturday morning.
The noise roused his little brother, 4-month-old Ronald. But Ronald, who was tucked into a baby carrier affixed to his mother Lindsay Connors’ torso, didn’t fuss as he awoke to the bustle of the market, which is new to town this year.
The Connorses, who live in Massachusetts, were in the area for a wedding in New London, and it was their first trip as a family of four, said Connors. As she held Ronald, her husband, also named Michael, monitored their older son’s fire truck activities.
In fact, it had been so long since the family had traveled, Connors said, “I don’t remember the last time.”
The Connors family had company on Main Street in Sunapee on Saturday. Nearby restaurants and shops appeared to be doing steady business, unfazed by news that the delta variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is surging in the country or overly troubled by staffing woes that have forced some Upper Valley restaurants to cut their hours.
“There’s a lot of people here, more than normal,” said Chip Steward, sales manager for Sunapee Cruises, which is owned by the same family that runs Fenton’s Landing, a deli and grocery store in Sunapee Harbor, and Appleseed Restaurant in nearby Bradford, N.H. “It’s just been busy all year long.”
Nightly dinner boats are booking up to a week in advance, and daily lake tours also book up on nice days, Steward said. In addition, the company is busy with private charters for weddings, rehearsal dinners, family reunions, corporate events and senior centers. Sunapee Cruises has boats that are sailing as many as five times a day. It’s so busy, the company purchased a new boat that arrived earlier this summer.
Steward said staffing challenges are “real” and the company could use more than it has, especially when students go back to school in the fall, but the “good news is we have a fun product, so we can attract people to work for us.”
Sunapee resident Teresa Trenholm, who was on Main Street for the farmers market, said that having more people in town and tighter staffing means that people have to make reservations at restaurants that used to be walk-in.
The restaurants are also “out of certain things” with supply chain issues hitting food distributors, she said.
The wet weather this summer has put a bit of a damper on lake-based activities, said Will Sencabaugh, harbor liaison officer with the Sunapee Police Department.
“Anytime it rains … it’s a ghost town,” Sencabaugh said. But, he said, glimpsing up at Saturday’s bright sky, “it’s a good day.”
From the sand at Dewey Beach down the street, Diane Robbins, of Sunapee, said that while she could do without so much wet weather, she thought cooler temperatures were helping to prevent algae blooms that sometimes force beaches to close.
The “water quality is good this year,” she said.
In spite of the recent uptick in traffic around town, Robbins said, she’s “happy to be here.”
Sara Walz, of Sunapee, followed her 15-month-old daughter, Lyla, as she toddled around the market on Main Street. Walz said the town has been a “good place to wait out the pandemic.”
She’s not the only one. Normally a summer person, Andrew Woodberry, who went to Dartmouth College and now works for a San Francisco-based technology company, and his wife, a professor at a Florida-based university, and toddler have weathered the pandemic at Eastman in Springfield, N.H.
Woodberry’s almost 3-year-old, Wilder, licked a vanilla ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles at the Sanctuary Dairy Farm Ice Cream stand on Route 103 in Sunapee on Saturday. The stand is one of their regular stops along a weekend loop that also includes the transfer station and grocery store.
Wilder “never gets tired of animals,” especially the donkeys at Sanctuary Farm, Woodberry said. The farm equipment, including tractors and a lawn mower, are also attractions for the youngster.
The family plans to spend one more full year at Eastman before heading back to Florida, Woodberry said. His wife will have to return to teaching and “two winters up here is honestly enough,” he said.
Back at the market on Main Street, Scott Blewitt, the town’s recreation director and one of the market’s organizers, sat under a tent and said it was “good to see smiles” now that most people aren’t wearing masks.
Blewitt said he’s concerned about the delta variant but hopes that the region’s relatively high vaccination rate will prevent a large uptick in COVID-19 cases. As he plans recreation programs for the fall, Blewitt said he is going to “proceed as normal until there’s a reason not to.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
