New Hampshire getaway a feel-good stop

History and modern charm merge in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. - Photo by Josh Noel/Chicago Tribune/MCT

But you know what becomes of a place that only looks back without looking ahead? It gets boring. So you built yourself for the here and now. You have shops. You have restaurants. One of the most popular boasts among your locals is that you have “the most restaurants per capita.” Here I actually might believe it.

Upon checking in at my downtown hotel, I asked the desk clerk what there was to do in town.

“Do you like to eat and drink?” she said.

I laughed.

She wasn’t joking.

Downtown Portsmouth is home to about 50 restaurants. In a town of 21,000!

Just as I started to wonder if you could be any more perfect, Portsmouth, I strolled out of downtown and into the neighbourhoods. I wound up in the South End, the oldest part of town, on Gates Street.

I passed a plastic box affixed to a stick planted in the ground. On the box, stuffed with white sheets of paper, was written, “These poems are brought to you by the Poetry Readers of Gates Street.” New poems are added every other week, and “there are extra copies in the back!” That week’s offerings included Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore and Robert Frost.
Poetry as a civic right? Aren’t we getting a little professorial, Portsmouth?

But then Vern Stump, 71, a former interior designer in Boston who moved here 15 years ago, said it gets even better. Through his church, he volunteers to feed homeless people once a week. Different restaurants take the lead each week, and one of them routinely serves gourmet meals.

“Once they served a lobster and shrimp bisque, with pieces of lobster this big,” Stump said, holding his hands about four inches apart. “But the gentlemen there, you know, they’d rather have meat and potatoes.”

OK, so there’s one down side to you Portsmouth: You’re a tough place to be homeless. I mean, the lobster is so large and plentiful!

But Stump had a few complaints of his own. He missed the times when you were a little more blue-collar and hardscrabble, a motif that he said started to flee in the 1960s.

“So much money has moved in,” he said. “And it used to be more local. There used to not be tourists in winter. Now it’s all year round.”

Really, it’s your own fault. It’s what you get for being so darn perfect, Portsmouth.

Location: Portsmouth is about 60 miles (96.5km) north of Boston. For any New England road trip, Portsmouth is a worthy stop for a couple of nights. The closest airports are in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire, about 45 miles (72.4km) away.

Food: Several locals insisted Portsmouth has “the most restaurants per capita,” and though I could find no evidence of that, it is an undeniably rich restaurant scene. – Chicago Tribune/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services