Live Free or Die

Bonus points if you can guess the reason for this blog title? If you knew that this is the motto for New Hampshire you get the prize! After the hustle and bustle of Boston, we are enjoying the rural New Hampshire sights.

We started with a trip into Portsmouth. Billed as a nice New England town and the building place for submarines, we found the city to be very neat (as in tidy) and somewhat eclectic. Our first stop was a house designated as the home of John Paul Jones. Actually, his time here was brief and he only rented a room in the house. At the time he was here, however, he was supervising the construction of the America, a ship for the newly established United States.

Now established as a museum for Portsmouth, a hard working group of volunteers continues work on the garden. We enjoyed the early fruits of their labor in these tulips!

We continued carefully around the town. The streets are narrow and meet at odd angles amongst very tall, compactly placed houses and shops.

Everything had a look of being well-kept and preserved and we enjoyed the glimpse of life in this busy town.

We also wanted to see the Albacore, an early submarine research vessel. Launched in the late 1950's, we enjoyed learning about efforts to develop a boat that was both fast and quiet!

Exporing further in the town, it wasn't long before we found ourselves in Maine! The New Hampshire coastline is relatively short. Lots of homes and docks are nestled in quiet coves along the coastline with evidence of many buoys with lobster traps attached.

The boys smiles are a little frozen and it's not just because of the pose. The sun was deceptive as the breeze off that Atlantic water was very cold! We didn't stay out in it long with our light jackets!

Ready for a break, we found an interesting old grocery store that offered us coffee and Coca Cola in the old fashioned small glass bottles! Cory is an enthusiast of Coca Cola in a glass bottle, so we couldn't pass this up. The grocery is well preserved, inside and out and we enjoyed the trip back in time as we took a little break from the driving and looking.

Across the street is an old delivery truck belonging to the grocery.

All in all, our day was a nice change of pace - to simply looking around at a place that was new to us - very nice!

Oh - and the prize for knowing about New Hampshire's motto? Isn't just knowing you are that smart prize enough? Well, that'll have to do as we don't have a reward system worked out! Congratulations anyway!