We started out this morning on the road, driving through hours of cold rain with temperatures just above freezing. Upon arriving at the Atlantic Ocean in Salisbury, MA, we started driving north to the nearby New Hampshire border. When then continued on to drive the entire New Hampshire coastline, all 20 miles or so!
We didn’t stop until North Beach, about a third of the way up the NH coast. Most surfaces were covered in a thin layer of ice, though pavement wasn’t too bad. There were only a few people walking around outside though we did see many cars parked at the many houses along the coastline.
Our next stop was Rye Harbor State Park. Again, a thin layer of ice everywhere including on all the plants. We saw a few fishing boats still in the water while everything else was sitting on land for the winter.
Rye Harbor is home to a monument to John Smith, one of the founders of the Jamestown settlement. He explored the coastline here in 1614 and is honored by this obelisk for this voyage as well as his other activates in the settlement of New England.
Odiorne Point State Park is home to a small maritime science museum, the Seacoast Science Center, right on the rugged coastline. It was closed as it is Christmas today but the park was open for exploration. We walked around a small picnic area which contained the remnants of gun batteries. There was also a larger structure that we were able to walk on top of after ascending a set of icy stairs, though there wasn’t much up there to see.
A little bit further up the coast, nearly at the border with Maine, we stopped at Great Island Common, a city park at the edge of New Castle. We saw three different lighthouses, one in New Hampshire and two in Maine.
It’s not clear if this sculpture has a formal name, but multiple places on the Internet refer to it as the Pose Inside Outdoor Picture Frame. It is pretty self-explanatory though!
We ended our coastline drive at Four Tree Island in Portsmouth, NH. There appeared to be more than four trees. We didn’t actually walk around the little island as it was covered with Canada Geese poop and the brick path was extremely icy!
The Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is across the river in Maine. We didn’t see anything interesting though there was a Coast Guard cutter present. In the other direction, we saw some fishing boats as well as lobster (or crab) pots stacked up by the dock.