Squam Lake

And On Golden Pond has always been my favorite film ever.

So much so that I thought I would visit Squam Lake where On Golden Pond was filmed.

And you can take a tour and you can see the actual cottage where they filmed it.

And for an additional couple hundred bucks, the guy who wrote On Golden Pond, Ernest Thompson, will meet you and he will show you his Oscar that he won for On Golden Pond.

So I contacted Squam Lake Tourism and I said, how do I get in touch with Ernest Thompson, the guy that wrote On Golden Pond? Well, they gave me his number and we've been sort of pen pals ever since.

Not really pen pals, but texting pals ever since.

So I had Ernest Thompson on the show and I have to say that was the most moving conversation of all of them.

But the magic didn't last, and by 1937, she was confiding dissatisfaction in letters to friends, and by 1938, the cracks were widening.

That October of 1937, the couple had rented an old farmhouse on Pulsifer Hill near Squam Lake in New Hampshire for the astonishing rate of $2.50 a month.

I had to run that one through an inflation calculator since I was pretty sure that was still well under $100 per month, and I was right.

That old farmhouse cost the couple approximately $60 a month to rent in present-day money.

If I had a formerly famous wife and she went missing in the 1930s, I would absolutely emphasize her maiden name, because I would want the case to go as wide as possible.

Nick clearly didn't seem to have much interest in Barbara's disappearance being widely reported, as it would have been if her maiden name was used.

There is also that idyllic farmhouse near Squam Lake with the cheap rent.

Nick and Barbara had rented it together, Barbara knew the surrounding woods intimately, and Nick reportedly retained the property into the summer of 1940.