YOU can tell a lot about a person by the way he vacations. Show me a weeklong trek through the Ecuadorean rain forest and I’ll show you someone who values adventure over thread counts; show me a 10-day-long sprawl on a beach and I’ll show you someone who has complicated feelings about the word “leathery.”


Over this past month, we have been learning that when Mitt Romney vacations, he likes to go with as many members of his family as possible to his property on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, where he Jet Skis and eats ice cream and works on his laptop on his private beach.


The town of Wolfeboro (population 6,269), where Mr. Romney has his home, calls itself “the oldest resort in America,” and it is a living tribute to the word “adorable.” How adorable? There’s a bandstand on the edge of the lake. You can get around town on Molly the Trolley, a partly open-air bus styled after a 19th-century trolley car. Teenage servers in restaurants are prone to drawing a smiley face on your check. The name of the hospital is Huggins.


In the event that this Pleasantville were to become White House North, is it a White House North that I would want to visit? Eager to find out, I threw some stuff into a bag — sunscreen, an Alison Bechdel graphic novel, my anxieties about motorized boating — and headed north.


My first stop was the popular, jam-packed sports equipment and rentals store, Dive Winnipesaukee, located in the three-city-block-long center of Wolfeboro. I rented a rowboat from a friendly tan fellow in his 20s wearing board shorts, telling him, “I got fired up by a photo that I saw of Mitt and Ann Romney on their Jet Ski, but I’m starting small.” He nodded and said, “This is a good little boat.”


Ten minutes of rowing on the lake afforded beautiful views of the Belknap Mountains and the hilltop campus of the Brewster Academy prep school. The ale-colored light was nostalgic-making. I marveled at the undulating hills and thought, by gum, the trees are the right height.


Before he required a full security presence, Mr. Romney was known to ride his Boston Whaler from his house right into town. So I followed suit by rowing to the town docks, whereupon I instantly fell into a status-based shame spiral: my boat was so small and so unmotored compared with everyone else’s. Indeed, it was a collapse of ego that could be remedied only by rowing over to the dock of my hotel, the Wolfeboro Inn, and then going inside and somewhat regally announcing to the calm woman behind the desk, “I’ve moored my craft to your dock.” Her eyes widened. She smiled indulgently and said, “You’re fine.”


My next foray combined two bits of Romney behavior — helmetless bike riding and working while vacationing. I rented a bike at the Nordic Skier and rode Wolfeboro’s terrific 11-mile-long Cotton Valley Rail Trail bike path while checking my e-mail. The trail is mostly a disused train track that’s been filled in with dirt; it runs through backyards, forest and, most excitingly, the middle of a lake. That I was averting my gaze from the lovely scenery and from safety’s way was both dangerous and stupid. In my efforts to simultaneously be productive and not crash, I deleted a work e-mail before reading it. What if that had been North Korea writing to say, “We’re invading”?


I knew I could do better on the working-while-vacationing front. So I returned the bike and went to the centrally located Country Bookseller, where I told two employees about a book I recently published but that they don’t carry. “There,” I thought. “I’m not simply vacationing, I’m also re-energizing my base.”


From there, dinner at Mise en Place, where Mr. Romney has been sighted. Alongside my dinner at the Chinese restaurant Sea Bird, it was one of the best meals I’d have during my stay in Wolfeboro; the pan-roasted salmon, infused with red Thai curry and accompanied by pineapple and ginger salsa, was not what I expected to find in the woodsy middle of the state that brought us Aerosmith and Adam Sandler. I smiled deeply. Romney-impersonating can be so broadening.