Portsmouth

Lia and I arrived in Portsmouth on a whim, having realized New Hampshire’s entire stretch of Atlantic coast is barely eighteen miles long and this compact harbor town claims most of it worth claiming. We parked once and never moved the car again for two days, wandering instead down Market Street’s brick sidewalks, past gambrel-roofed sea captains’ houses and a working tugboat dock, the Piscataqua River tugging at its moorings with a current so strong locals warned us never to swim in it.

Strawbery Banke and the old waterfront

Strawbery Banke Museum anchors the town’s oldest neighborhood, a ten-acre outdoor museum of houses spanning four centuries, each restored to a different era — a 1695 saltbox beside a 1950s postwar kitchen, docents in period dress tending kitchen gardens between them. Lia lingered longest in the Puddle Dock houses, once home to Portsmouth’s Black and immigrant communities, their stories woven carefully into the museum’s telling. Afterward we walked down to the working waterfront along Ceres Street, where tugboats still nose barges up the swift Piscataqua, one of the fastest-flowing navigable rivers in the country.

Oysters, breweries, and Market Square

Portsmouth’s downtown punches well above its size for food and drink — we ate raw Great Bay oysters at a counter seat that felt more Brooklyn than New Hampshire, then walked off dinner past Market Square’s landmark North Church steeple, its white spire lit gold against the evening sky. The town’s old warehouses and mill buildings have become a small constellation of breweries and distilleries, and we spent a lazy afternoon hopping between two of them along the river, comparing a smoked porter against a crisp saison while gulls wheeled over the docks outside.

New Castle and the Isles of Shoals

One clear morning we drove the short loop out to New Castle, a tiny island town connected by causeway, where Fort Constitution’s stone ramparts guard the harbor mouth and the Wentworth by the Sea hotel presides over the coast in white-columned grandeur. From the town dock we caught a boat out toward the Isles of Shoals, a scattering of rocky islands nine miles offshore, straddling the New Hampshire–Maine line, where Lia spotted seals hauled out on the ledges and I mostly failed to keep my footing on the rolling deck.

Getting There

Portsmouth sits about an hour north of Boston’s Logan Airport via I-95, making it an easy day trip or weekend add-on for anyone already in New England, and roughly ninety minutes south of Portland, Maine. There is no major airport in town, but the drive itself, especially the final stretch crossing the Piscataqua River Bridge into New Hampshire, offers a fine first glimpse of the harbor and its clustered church steeples.