The New Hampshire Coast

Today Ashley and I took a trip down highway 1A, the coastal road that runs from Portsmouth down into Massachusetts. We thought we would drive for a bit and find a nice beach to sit on and read, maybe dip our toes in the Atlantic. The 1A follows the coast through Rye and Hampton, both of which have a lot of beaches, so I thought this would be an easy jaunt.

Turns out the New England coast isn't like the Washington coast. It's very developed. Ashley and I found ourselves driving through tourist town after tourist town, little Atlantic replicas of Seaside, Oregon, with businesses like the Aegean Inn and the Lobster Lock-up. Here's Little Jack's.

Lobsters are everywhere. They're on the Maine license plate, on many restaurants (almost every restaurant, cafe, or crappy food stand serves lobster), even on lots of signs, billboards, and hotel vacancy signs. Here's a carved wooden one at the place we stopped for lunch.

These little coastal tourist towns seem to be 75% parking lot. It turns out most of New Hampshire's coastline is rocky and not too great for sunbathing or volleyball, so the tiny portions of beach that are sandy and flat are packed. I wish we'd gotten a picture of the thousands of tourists on the sand, but it looked a lot like this.

I guess hanging out under a sun umbrella is a really New Englandy thing to do. Between Rye and Hampton we drove past a line of seaside houses. In Washington, you have to be pretty loaded to pay for a house right on the water, but these houses surprised me. They were huge, gated, built of imported stone, with croquet lawns, manicured gardens (we even saw a couple of gardeners tending to one), and spacious rooftop decks. Ridiculous!

After a stop for lunch and a bit of backtracking, Ashley and I did find a stretch of uncrowded beach, where the parking was free. I think it was mostly empty because it was covered in rocks and there was no easy access from the road (we had to scramble down a hill of boulders to get to it). It was nice to lie in the sun and get my feet wet in the Atlantic. Next time we head out to the coast I know what to expect.

In other news, Ashley and I tried the lobster rolls, which she loved but were a bit on the mayo-y side for me. We're supposed to get a bed any day now, which is good news because the air mattress doesn't hold air so well any more (sorry Mom and Dad, who we borrowed it from), and we had to sleep on the floor last night. Our backs are killing us. Also I've started getting deeper into the job hunt. Fingers crossed for a nice job teaching composition online!

Notes on beer

The day we arrived we hit the grocery store to stock up on essentials. I investigated the beer aisle. Beer is cheap here, and our local supermarket (Hannaford) carries beer from quite a few microbreweries I recognize--Kona, Dogfish Head, Blue Moon, and Red Hook to name a few. I've also heard it's easy to find Alaskan over here. What isn't easy to find is Pyramid, and this is going to be a big problem when winter rolls around and Snow Cap hits the shelves in the Pacific Northwest. Ashley assures me that there will be good winter brews here too, but my stomach still yearns for Snow Cap.

Also, Sam Adams is everywhere. Everywhere. I'm trying to think of a beer that's as prevalent in Washington as Sam Adams is here, but I can't. There are Sam Adams displays, letterboards with sales chalked on them, giveaways, flyers, delivery vans--everywhere I look I see the smug grinning bastard face of Samuel Adams.

Drink my beer, Ian. You're in my land now. Mwahaha.

I had a glass of the Sam Adams summer ale at Fat Belly's, a grill Ashley and I stopped at in Portsmouth, and it was very disappointing. I know their lager is good, though, so maybe not all is lost.

That first day at the grocery I picked up a six-pack from an excellent brewery in Maine called Shipyard. Like almost everything else in Maine, this beer has a lobster on it:


This beer was excellent. Yesterday at the store I tried to pick up their Export Ale, but they only had twelve packs and I was feeling poor (also, I have nobody to share the beer with), so instead I picked up a six-pack of Smuttynose IPA. Smuttynose is based out of Portsmouth, just a few miles from my apartment, and this is one of the better bottled IPAs I've had. It's as hoppy as some of Boundary Bay's brews. It reminded me of Bellingham. Pretty tasty stuff.

In other beer news, Ashley and I made beercan chicken a few nights ago (this was a disaster--don't ask) and the only can of beer we had in the apartment was the Sturgis memorial lager.


For those of your unfamiliar with beercan chicken, you have to drink the can about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way down before you can use it, so it was up to me to choke down six horrible ounces of biker brew. Unsurprisingly, it tasted like crap. Friends and family, you better get ready to fill me with delicious Northwest beer when I return. And now, here are a bunch of random pictures from the last week. Click for less blurry versions.

Our new apartment, still in its early stages.

Bedroom mess.

This is the single most difficult piece of furniture I've ever put together. Gah!

Ashley and I took a walk through Portsmouth, and it was good.

More Portsmouth.