Parker River National Wildlife Refuge and a Minke Whale…

We sure enjoyed our last few days in sunny New England. A couple of afternoons we took off to explore Hampton Beach NH and the coastline going south. Hampton Beach is quite large and nice but certainly has some pricey parking for visitors who wish to spend some time there. Fortunately it is off season so we found a lot of state parks along the coast which have no fees for entering at this time of year.

We stopped at several of the state parks north of Hampton Beach such as Rye Harbor State Park, Cable Beach and North Hampton Beach. The rocky shoreline along this part of New England is quite scenic and fun to explore especially during low tide. Our driving days started out overcast but ended up exceptionally nice as the day wore on.

The best encounter was at Seabrook Town Beach in Massachusetts as we saw a whale not far from the shore. A fellow we spoke with said there had been sightings of a Humpback Whale and that is why he came hoping to see it. I am pretty sure that is what I saw rolling in the sea since it was large and greyish like the many humpbacks I have seen before in Antarctic waters in my past travels…

A while later we spotted a Northern Minke whale actively feeding really close to the shoreline. I was able to snap a few photos although they aren’t great. However, if you click on them to enlarge them you can see some of the fish scattering as it breached to feed on them. How super cool it was to see my first ever Northern Minke!!! We happily watched through our binoculars until the whale turned out to sea.  Awesome.

South of Seabrook MA we stopped to explore the really cool little town of Newburyport MA. It turned out to be a really neat little historic town with several old buildings to explore. We also browsed a consignment shop called Oldies which had several interesting antiques. One table I would have surely bought if we had a house,  whew… close call!

After exploring Newburyport we drove further south over to Plum Island. On the far south end of Plum Island is the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. What an absolutely beautiful, pristine and natural beach we found on the southernmost tip of the refuge.

There was a beautiful flat sandy beach on the point  and a small hill adjacent to it.  It was near this hill where we found a fabulous rocky beach. The rocks along the beach which are normally underwater were exposed due to low tide and made the rocky beach profoundly interesting and surreal. We simply loved seeing this cool beach on the wildlife refuge.

After finishing up our drive we of course had to go back to Smuttynose Brewery near our RV park to have one more of their delicious craft beers. We also stocked up on our favorite Rhye IPA  which lucky for us was on sale for $10 per six pack. We now have more beer in our RV than we have ever had but I will be sure not to let it go past its peak freshness date…

NOTE: We decided to put some miles between us and Hurricane Jose since it will likely impact any fun we wanted to have along the Massachusetts coastline so we have scooted about 600 miles south over the last three days to Virginia…