After visiting Newbury, I decided to head west into West Newbury as the next on the marathon of towns that I would visit before I headed up the New Hampshire coast. After leaving Newbury, I used my handy map feature on my iPhone to find the back roads to make my way to West Newbury Center. It a pretty rural area and I found myself soon driving through the Crane Pond Wildlife Management Area, and I was delightfully surprised that there was a section of the road that was unpaved. It certainly wasn’t that they couldn’t afford to pave it, but that it would help the ecology of the marshland. I liked it!
Upon finally reaching the center at Route 113, I stopped and got out to take a walk. Whereas Byfield felt more like an out of the way village, West Newbury was a wide place in the road. There were a lot of really nice houses in the colonial style, and a few other business such as a gift shop, a barber shop, and a pizza place but for the most part it was just a more filled in part of the rest of the road. From what I’ve read and what I experienced, the people of West Newbury have been trying to keep the town from being too built up, and that they way they like it. There are other bigger towns (notably Newburyport) in the area, and they didn’t have a need to make it more that it is.
I saw people working on their houses and gardens, but there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic!
It was a nice stop, but I had more places to visit. Onto Merrimac.
So, when do you know when to accept things as they are?