DH and I are travelling to the north east US in August to pick up DD (19) from her summer camp and tag a holiday on the end. We have most of our accommodation booked, and a hire car from arrival in Boston until we go to New York (flying out of JFK but dropping the car at La Guardia before staying carless in Manhattan). We have very few things planned or booked to do and could do with some inspiration. We also have a gap in our accommodation and itinerary that is frustrating me - the whole thing being quite open-ended meant it took me about six hours last weekend to settle on one place to stay and now I have to do it all over again!
I think I’m quite easy to please. I like nice food and drink, chilling outside, reading a book in a cafe, going for a walk. I like bookshops, museums of almost any kind, history (especially social history), true crime, witches, and cemeteries. I don’t want to do too many things we could do pretty much anywhere, and I’m not great with heights.
DD and DH have far less tolerance for bookshops, museums and cemeteries, but will humour me for a while. Both have great heads for height and have enjoyed all sorts of stuff in that ilk in the past while I’ve bumbled about in the ground. DH now however had a chronic neck injury that rules out the more extreme stuff.
DD is chill about what we do to the point of being unhelpful. She’s doing Korean at university and is into modern Korean culture (history not so much). I’ve taken her on numerous trips to London, she didn’t hate anything, but pretty much the only thing she really loved was an interactive Alice in Wonderland show (Alice’s Adventures Underground, I think it’s back on in Waterloo this late summer/autumn and it’s amazing). Oh, and one of her many Netflix repeat watches is Gilmore Girls, so she might enjoy a real life Stars Hollow if we can find such a place!
Stop 1 is Lincoln, NH, where we have a winery tour booked, and do nothing other than that plus hopefully have a couple of nice dinners, check out the area a bit, and look forward to seeing DD after two months.
We then pick up DD and travel to stop 2, Rumney, NH (it’s nowhere in particular, just found a nice-looking cabin to stay in). It’s only about half an hour away, just as well as we have a zip line thing booked the following day which is practically back in Lincoln. Three nights here so we then have the whole of Sunday with nothing planned.
Then there is the gap. This needs to be stop 3 of three nights as I can’t bare to split it and have to find two more places to stay! We are about five hours away from New York at this point, so it would be good but not essential to get a little closer. Certainly don’t want to go north. Don’t want to drive anywhere too challenging, so wouldn’t want to stay in central Boston for instance. I quite want to go to Salem, but not sure there’s enough to justify it, and pretty sure we don’t want to stay there. Considering somewhere west of Boston to make Salem and Boston themselves accessible, but nowhere is standing out. Also considered Rhode Island, in part for the rather silly reason DH and I have been to the other five states in New England but not RI. Or the very vague idea we could go much further south into Connecticut and really reduce how much driving we need to do to get to NY.
We then have stop 4, Thursday to Sunday in New York. Definitely want to do something up high (eg Empire State but probably not that specifically) and the 9/11 museum. We have tickets to Hadestown Friday night. Obviously there’s no shortage of things to do but ideas still welcome, and clever tips.
Very grateful if anyone has read this absolute unit of a post and has any ideas … if not I think it’s helped me anyway to write it all out!