Instead of hopping on a plane right after our wedding, we decided to drive up north for our honeymoon. We knew we wanted to go to Maine where his family vacations every summer for a few days, but I also wanted to go somewhere in New England since I really had never spent more than an evening there before (except in Bristol, RI for the 4th of July…best ever!!). My mom suggested that we go to Portsmouth, NH for a couple days and hooked us up with rewards points to stay at Wentworth by the Sea.
{ via Wentworth }
One of my favorite decisions? We didn’t leave the day after the wedding. We actually left the Wednesday after and even then took our time getting out of the house. I didn’t want to come home to a mess of wilting (at best) wedding flowers and clutter everywhere so once the house was in good shape, we hopped in the car for the 6ish hour drive to New Hampshire. We didn’t get in until late Wednesday night, but I’m still glad we spent the time to clean up…it was really nice being on our own schedule and not rushing to catch a plane! Once we got to the hotel, we just had a quick bite to eat and then hit the hay.
Thursday we got up and had breakfast at the concierge lounge before heading into Portsmouth to walk around town. It was full of unique restaurants (except for Starbucks which was totally deserted) and independent shops which featured almost all local artists. It was very refreshing to shop in stores that supported extremely talented and mostly local art.
My favorite store by far in Portsmouth was Gus & Ruby Letterpress. It was like stepping into all my favorite etsy stores and seeing artists from all my favorite blogs at once! If you just check out their website you can see a list of who they carry and you’ll see what I mean! Seriously though, when I saw their wall of cards I felt like I was looking at a photo from someone’s blog about the National Stationery Show.
While I loved everything in the store, we saw some prints by Freya and decided that we’d like to get one. Two of our favorites that they had in store were:
and
{ via Freya Art’s etsy shop }
We still needed to narrow it down though so we decided to come back later.
After asking for advice on where to have lunch, everyone pointed us to the restaurants on the river so off we went. While we were waiting, I snapped a photo of Mr. playing with his wedding band from my phone :)
We had dinner at Cava which was an incredible contemporary spin on traditional Spanish tapas. We had the chef’s tasting menu and ended it with a dessert topped with pop rocks!!! For real. Amazing dinner, amazing dessert, and isn’t this a cool sign too?
Friday was a fun day. We had very yummy breakfast at Colby’s on Daniel Street and then went back to Gus and Ruby to choose which print to buy. We actually got to meet Gus himself and had a very nice chat with his mom and co-owner of the store, Samantha!
How cute is that window? The garlands, the bike, the chandelier…I should have gotten a full shot of the entire storefront but just know this store was a true gem. The final decision (although I wanted to buy the entire store) was a medium sized print of this one:
I thought it was very appropriate and loved the colors :) I love Freya’s prints and definitely plan on purchasing more in the future. I think the larger size of this print in particular would look good in our kitchen:
{ both via Freya Art’s etsy shop }
The big plan for the day though was to do 2 brewery tours: Smuttynose and Red Hook. We started off at Smuttynose:
Classy glasses, no? The tour was ok…it was a lot about the process of making beer and not a whole lot about the company. I like to hear fun facts about the brewery since we already know the basics of brewing. Besides, it was too hot and the people around me smelled like that smell where you don’t take your wash out of the dryer until it’s already dry and then it’s all mildewy and stuff…blech.
The Red Hook tour on the other hand was awesome. Our tour guide was hilarious and told us all about the company and their brewery in Portsmouth. He gave us a quick overview of how they make the beer and showed us some of where they make it, but the main part of the tour was actually the tasting part where we got to learn a lot about the individual beers. Very cool and very fun. Highly recommended!
After we had dinner at the Red Hook brewery, we took at nap back at the hotel with the intention of waking up to go out again but…that didn’t happen. We ended up just falling asleep for the evening to the sound of some pretty serious thunderstorms, waking up now and then to see some wicked cool lightning (like my New England vocab? :) )
The next morning we got all packed up and hit the road for Maine! More to come…