Hi fellow Travelers,

The other day we spent some time in a new spot for us, the Great Bay estuary in Portsmouth New Hampshire!

Great Bay Estuary

The great thing about living in an area that’s so topographically diverse such as the New England coast area is that we get to see all kinds of incredibly interesting things! This is one of the fun things about living here for sure, among others parts of course.

The great bay estuary is something I never knew existed despite it being only a few dozen miles away from me wherever I lived in the Massachusetts area. It’s in south eastern New Hampshire, along the small portion of it that reaches the coastline. I learned that an estuary is the region where a fresh water river meets the salt water of the ocean and blends to become brackish water. Gotta love the little kid magazines we get! Ranger Rick is where I learned that fun tidbit lol.

They definitely did a great job of preserving and bringing back the area! I don’t know what it looked like before but with a city such as Portsmouth, it’s a very industrial area with lots of commercial stuff so it might have gotten pretty damaged a few decades ago. Today it’s a thriving and beautiful place to spend time for sure. There are lots of great animals, fish and wildlife all over the place. We almost hit countless critters when we were driving to the place so that’s always a good sign in my book lol

The map of the place is huge! There were a few of them that describes the different areas you can walk around and things you can do. We stayed close to the little information booth area, we had just stopped by to see if we could do some fishing and learned that there was all kinds of cool stuff here. I think we will definitely go back in a few weeks when we are looking for something to do but it was really nice to see such an interesting area! Lots of trails around, birds and things to look at.

I forget how many it said but it’s definitely a couple thousand acres of preserved land. The area has some houses on it already, which probably helped in the decision to preserve it. I find it interesting that people build on pristine land like that and then decide that now that their house is here, they want to preserve it and block others from building something. Arrogance maybe, I don’t know. In any case it’s a huge amount of land! The bay itself isn’t very deep from what one of the locals was telling me, you can walk out a thousand feet when it’s low tide and it’s mud so I’m not sure where the deeper water is. We don’t have any type of boat so it’s hard to get an appreciation for that type of stuff.

It was really cool there were lots of these bird houses dotting the property all over the place. I enjoyed seeing the focus on helping keep the wild animals in a good place even if surrounding the area is pretty extensively developed. I didn’t see any birds in them but that’s probably because the eggs are most likely already hatched. Hopefully the birds use the houses! It was a cool little log cabin lol

This was perhaps my favorite part of the building and surrounding space! They built a living wall for the plants to grow and it’s filled with lots of flowers and stuff for the pollinators and birds who rely on that to survive. The place also has these rainwater barrels that they use to water the plants so they don’t use any water from the system! That’s really cool and a great idea that we will hopefully be able to use in our future.

They also had this cool house for kids to play in but what’s interesting about it was the living roof that it’s got! I don’t see many of those around here, I’ve seen it a lot on things that are in the Pacific Northwest but not so much around here for whatever reason. I thought this was a cool way to use the direct sunshine a roof gets to produce some nice oxygen but keep the structure below it cooler since it’s not absorbing the heat like a tile or shingle roof would.

This was a group of signs that highlighted some of the ways the complex here was doing to reduce its wastes and keep things on a better environmentally savvy trend. I don’t know if I could work with a composting toilet just yet, I know they are probably going to be more prevalent in the future but I would rather pay the money to have it go in the sewer system and cleaned at a treatment plant honestly lol.

There was also this pretty unique and great made-made rock river here. I think the little man managed to find a fish or two and some frogs crawling around it, it was great!

One of the things I really enjoyed about this area up here is that it was very tranquil and peaceful to just sit and hang out for a bit. There was a bunch of good benches around and ample places to just sit and watch the flowers, bugs and wind move things around.

Aside from the great conservation of the area immediately around the estuary, there was some houses that were built on it. I don't know if they just didn't want any additional competition or houses built on it but it seemed a little improper to my taste. I think the area was indeed beautiful but in these scenarios, I tend to get a little negative and think people are just blocking others from building once they have their house built. I could be wrong though!

It was an overall beautiful place to visit, we will definitely be going back to check out more stuff! I think it would be good to visit it in the fall when the weather is a little cooler, or on a day that just happens to be cooler. We enjoyed walking around and stuff but it was a bit warm!

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