This Exeter Life: Be A Tourist

In what has become an annual event, I rediscovered the New Hampshire coastline this week.

Now, before you start to wonder how it is I could possibly forget that we live just 10 miles from one of the most beautiful expanses of coastline in America, you have understand where my head (and my body) is every summer. Connecticut.

In a ridiculous stroke of good fortune, I have spent every summer of my life installed on a patch of sandy beach in a small town on the Connecticut shoreline (which, I think it’s worth mentioning, bears a striking resemblance to Exeter). Despite the fact that I wait all year for summer in New Hampshire to arrive, as soon as the leaves start to appear in the spring, Long Island Sound and the prospect of afternoons in a beach chair with a book lure me southward. From May to September, my bathing suits and half my summer clothes live out of state and weekdays become what stand between me and my summer at the beach in Connecticut. 

But inevitably there comes a point in every summer where it’s just too dang hot to trudge through my weekly New Hampshire routine. And in that moment I remember—there’s a beach here too! Wednesday afternoon was that day. In a flurry of excitement, I packed a picnic and grabbed my emergency bathing suit—a sagging faded scrap of fabric that didn’t make the cut at my other beach—and headed out Route 111 to the edge of the continent.

Wow! What a day it was! An endless expanse of blue water greeted me as I emerged on 1A and it took my breath away. Of course it did. People travel hundreds of miles from other parts of New England and Canada to drive along the very coastline that is our backyard. And it took me until July to get out here. Shame on me.

I turned left onto Route 1A behind a pack of Massachusetts motorcyclists and a car with Quebec plates and wound my way north past the looming summer cottages from a bygone era. Like a tourist, I snapped pictures of the blue water and marveled at how clear the Isles of Shoals were. I braved the chilly water, winced as I stepped on the shards of dried seaweed, and sat tenuously on the stony beach. It was totally different than the beach in Connecticut, where I’d been just 24 hours earlier. And I loved every minute of it.

I always make a point to take my visitors for a drive along to the coast to show them how lucky I am to live in such a beautiful place. As it turns out, sometimes we need to take ourselves to the beach to experience that luck first hand. Why wait to be part of someone else’s vacation? Be a tourist in your own life and make this afternoon your own mini-vacation. You’ll come back to your normal routine feeling refreshed.

And the best part is it will only take you 20 minutes to get home.