The Last of the Covered Bridges — a stop on the Kancamagus Highway.
Since we've just passed one, let me give covered bridges their due — because New Hampshire is one of the last strongholds of them, and there's more engineering in that dim wooden tunnel than people realize.
The roof is the whole point, and it isn't for you. A big wooden bridge lives or dies by its trusses — the triangulated timber frame doing the actual work underneath. Leave that timber out in the New England weather and it rots in a decade or two. Put a roof and siding on it and it lasts a century and a half, which is exactly what the one behind us has done. They were, in the plainest terms, umbrellas for the structure.
There's a nice bit of folk history in it too. Different builders patented different truss designs — the Paddleford, the Burr arch, the Town lattice — and a New England bridgewright would tell you his was the only one worth having. And they became social places by accident: out of the rain, out of the sun, private for a minute. Courting couples worked that out immediately, which is why an awful lot of them got nicknamed kissing bridges.
New Hampshire has held onto more than fifty of them, more than almost anywhere. The one you just passed dates to eighteen fifty-eight — it was already old when the automobile was invented, and it's still carrying traffic.
If you liked it, there are several more within an easy drive of Conway, including a pair right in town.