On the whole, Boston, we were less than impressed with your horrendously cold and wet weather, putting a crimp in our touristy plans to get out and about and see as much of town as possible. Instead we did a lot of racing between under covered portico to under covered portico with other harried residents decked out in anoraks, wellingtons, scarves, gloves and no doubt thermals under the lot! Damn uncivilized of you, Boston. Mind you the rows and rows of walk up town houses still look kinda cool in the rain……the highway as we were heading out of town… not so cool at all! Visibility was low, most people were driving without their headlights on (bloody morons!), and continuing to change lanes without indicating (flamin’ wankers!), and speeding (fuckin’ eejits!). So not fun. Then the pouring rain started making strange noises. Sounded a bit like sand spraying all over the car, and that was when we realized that it was itty bitty frozen rain. 🙁 Not snow, and not big enough to be hail, so I guess it was sleet or some such shit.) Either way very unpleasant and the sound reminded us how cold it was outside… as if the windows fogging up and the seat heaters not cutting the mustard, weren’t already ramming that bit home!

Other than the ugly weather, driving around New England has been a lot of fun, and I find a sort of poetic irony in having spent the last few weeks engrossed in American history, particularly their struggle for independence from British rule – only to be driving around the countryside to places all named after towns in England. It started with the ‘News…’ New Jersey, New England, New Hampshire, New London, New York ferfucksake! And the further we went the more of it there was – Essex, Salisbury Plymouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, Georgetown, Manchester, Hampton, Dover, Bangor, Chester and it goes on and on and on. I guess all these places were named before “the Incident”. 🙂

Once the rain stopped we found Portsmouth in New Hampshire was really quite picturesque. There is a river that runs between New Hampshire and Maine, called the Piscataqua River, (I can’t even pronounce that shit) creating an effective state line. There was a lot of snow lying around in a manner that I found disconcerting – like it was stubbornly refusing to have the decency to melt in a timely fashion.

Now, as anyone I discussed this trip with before we left, y’all know that the sole reason we had for coming up this way was to:

1. check out the lighthouses,
2. rug up and walk on the beaches *scoff*, and
3. find as many lobster shacks as humanly possible!

Thanks to Yelp, TripAdvisor and Reddit, we took all the guess work out of choosing good places to check out. First stop was Warren’s Lobster House in Kittery, which is just over the Piscataqua River, placing it just in Maine… a genuine Maine lobster shack right on the water.

The menu was somewhat overwhelming, and evoked way too many questions – what on earth is popcorn lobster? do I want 1 and a 1/5 pound lobster? or 2, 1 pound lobsters? How much meat do you actually get from a boiled lobster anyway? Any why aren’t Americans on board with the fucking metric system yet? In the end, the lovely waitress told us there was about 9 oz (about 180gms) of lobster meat in a 1 1/4 pound lobster, which doesn’t sound like too much, so I opt for something called a Lobster trip to try and get a taste of all the good things – Stuffed lobster tails, steamed lobster claws and popcorn lobster! OMG. It was absolutely delicious! Lobstery goodness all round. They gave me a bib and an offer of assistance to help me get into the lobster if I ‘couldn’t figure it out’. Turns out I didn’t need either, all those years of fighting to get meat out of sand crabs and mud crabs totally paid off. 😀
We notice quite a few things driving around New England at the end of March… there’s a lot of stuff that is still “Closed For The Season”, which is a euphemism for “We think it’s too fucking cold and there aren’t enough visitors to open yet”. And ‘the Season’ seems to be really subjective. Some places were opening March 1, some felt the season started March 12 (no idea why), some said April 1, other signs said April 25, and some people we spoke to said, ‘usually after Labour Day’, which is like late May! So everyplace we went to see, it was bit hit and miss as to whether or not it was going to be open – we were mostly lucky but there’s plenty of restaurants, tourist centres and stuff that are all closed.

Another thing that we thought was really odd – people here still have their Christmas decorations up and it is now April. They have their plastic Santas and reindeers on their snow covered lawns, lights strung up on porches and wreaths still hanging on doors! Yeah… I’m usually trying to pack Xmas away the day after Boxing Day, so I am not really understanding this one. Still, things are so pretty here, even a frozen pond on a day that is about -3C and raining can still look quite beautiful, so long as you don’t have to get out of the car!
We had a few errands to do this afternoon and Mr K insisted we go into the store called ‘Big Lots!’ With absolutely no idea what they sold big lots of, we found ourselves in the biggest, tackiest, shit for sale you’ve ever seen – also known as a dollar store.
Only thing I saw here that I thought was fun, well funny really, was ‘Hamburger Helper’! I’d heard about it on TV shows and stuff, but never seen it – and to discover that it came in a variety of flavours? Well this was a real revelation! Ahuh, diverse flavours of Hamburger Helper, who’d’ve thunk? We also went looking for a couple of bottles of Shiraz, the booze here seems to be sold mostly in state run Liquor stores which is odd… but we won’t compain too much as it somehow seems to keep the prices (probably the taxes) down. Aussie wines were cheaper here than they are at home! This 1.75L bottle of Captain Morgans Private Stock was *drumroll please*… USD$32.00! At home you’d pay AUD$90.00 for a 750ml bottle, and that’s if you could find the stuff. I’d probably be a very accomplished alcoholic if I lived here.In the car park at the shopping centre, both Mr K and I notice at the exact same time that the motto for New Hampshire is “Live Free or Die” which seems a bit extreme nowadays. So we figured it too was a hangover from the struggle for Independence and took it upon ourselves to look it up. Not so, apparently the sentiment was penned by some old General in the Civil War era, but it wasn’t adopted as New Hampshire’s state motto until 1945, and there were Supreme Court rulings made on the displaying of the motto as recently as 1977 (some religious Jehovah Witness dude covered up the ‘or die’ bit on his number plate and ended up in court for defacing a licence plate), so it seems this whole state motto thing isn’t just them paying lip service to long dead ideals – libertarianism might be alive and well in New Hampshire (or free and dead, the jury is out).
We did manage to rug up and go for a bit of a wander around Portsmouth but as I said, there were LOTS of places that were closed, and many more that were bringing in all new stock getting ready for ‘the season, darlings’, but we did stumble on this cool little nautical gift shop called ‘Tugboat Alley’ – Surly would have loved this place, everything boats and knots and all nautical and sailing related are right up his alley. I had to take a pic of the door way with it’s port and starboard lights, we thought it was very cute.
Oh, and I found this pic for The Small Child… kiddo, if you were here, we would have totally taken you to the water park, just ignore all that white crunchy stuff you can see on the ground all around the park, that just softens your landing when you come down the slides!