Rye

New Hampshire’s Atlantic coastline runs a modest eighteen miles between Massachusetts and Maine, and Rye holds the best stretch of it — rocky headlands and tide pools rather than the sand-and-boardwalk scene you get a few towns over in Hampton. Lia and I came up from Boston for a weekend without much of a plan and ended up spending most of two days just working our way along Route 1A’s coastal road, pulling over wherever the ocean looked interesting.

Odiorne Point and the tide pools

Odiorne Point State Park, at Rye’s northern edge, marks the site of New Hampshire’s first European settlement in 1623, though almost nothing of that history is visible now beyond a small museum — what draws people is the rocky shoreline itself, exposed at low tide into a maze of tide pools thick with periwinkles, hermit crabs, and the occasional small crab defending its patch of rockweed. We came at exactly the right hour by accident, and spent close to two hours crouched over pools with a park ranger who happened to be doing a tour, learning more about intertidal ecosystems than I expected to on a weekend getaway.

The Isles of Shoals from shore

From Rye’s beaches and headlands, you can see the Isles of Shoals sitting hazy on the horizon about six miles offshore, a small archipelago split between New Hampshire and Maine that was once a thriving fishing outpost and later a Gilded Age resort. We didn’t take the ferry out this time, but sat on the rocks near Ragged Neck at sunset watching lobster boats work the channel between shore and islands, their buoys bobbing in long lines, and it was as close to a proper New England coastal evening as we’d had all trip.

Getting There

Rye is about an hour north of Boston Logan International Airport (BOS) via I-95 to Route 1A, and just fifteen minutes south of Portsmouth. A car is essential for exploring the coastal road properly, since the best spots are strung out along several miles of shoreline with no public transit connecting them.