2017 has been my busiest ever year for travel. I spent 84 days outside the UK on 12 foreign trips, some for business but most for pleasure. 30 of these days were spent on a sabbatical in Australia and New Zealand. I visited five new countries and ten countries in total: the Czech Republic (Prague); France (Paris and Cannes); Germany (Cologne); Italy (Padua); Norway (Oslo); Spain (Barcelona); the United States (New York, Boston, Cape Ann and Maine); Singapore; Australia; and New Zealand.

During my recent trip to Cape Ann, I went into Boston with my family on four days: a day trip, an evening at Fenway Park, and a day-and-a-half at the end of our stay. The weather ranged from cool and incredibly rainy on the day trip, to warm and sunny at the baseball game, to extremely hot on our penultimate day and hot, humid and sometimes rainy on our last day. Ah, New England summers!

I'm a city girl and tend to fill two-week holidays with multiple destination and many activities, but when my parents suggested a family holiday at a beach house near Gloucester, 40 miles northeast of Boston, the idea appealed greatly. We spent two weeks in Cape Ann 24 years ago and I was keen to return as an adult. I thought I'd spend time on the beach, read and write a lot, and take advantage of the regular trains into Boston. The weather was gorgeous so I did get lots of beach time but very little writing time as there were so many other things to do. Apparently, some 2,000 words' worth of things to do, thus this is a long read.

On our penultimate day in Massachusetts, we packed up our rental house and drove into Boston, dropping off our luggage at the hotel and the car at the car-hire office. It was a swelteringly hot afternoon and I wasn't planning to visit Gracenote Coffee's Boston coffee shop until the following day but when I realised I was so close to its location in the Leather District near South Station, it would have been silly not to go.

One of my favourite coffee shops from my visit to Boston in February was George Howell Coffee's beautiful flagship café in the Godfrey Hotel on Washington Street in Downtown Coffee. Last time, I didn't have chance to stop by their first Boston café at the lovely indoor gourmet-food market, Boston Public Market, next to Haymarket station, but I made it a priority on my recent trip.

The city of Portland, Maine, lies about 100 miles north of Boston and is the Pine Tree State's largest city, although still compact and easily explorable on foot or bike. The route from Gloucester, MA, where we are staying passes by Portsmouth and Kittery, which we visited last week, but I wanted to spend a full day in and around Portland and it's a relatively straightforward two-hour drive up the I-95, so we decided to make two separate trips. If you are car-free, the train from Boston takes about 2h30, so it's just about do-able as a day trip, although there's enough to do in and around Portland to keep you occupied for two or three days.

When I first started to look into the speciality coffee possibilities for my trip to Massachusetts a few months ago, about the only place outside the Boston area that I found was Little Wolf Coffee, a cafe–roastery in the small, historic town of Ipswich. There was a nice Sprudge article a few months ago about Little Wolf's awesome wolf-themed packaging and branding — which was a big draw for me both as a fan of Wolverhampton Wanderers (AKA Wolves) and in terms of the design.

After a gorgeous sunny day at the wonderful Good Harbor Beach on Wednesday, the weather was a bit more unsettled yesterday so we decided to drive up to the Kittery Outlets, a few miles over the Maine border, for a bit of retail therapy. I had done a bit of research beforehand and come to the conclusion that there wasn't any speciality coffee to be had in the town of Kittery and so didn't bring my camera with me.

If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram, you may know that I'm currently on holiday with my family in Massachusetts. We're staying at a beach house near Gloucester on Cape Ann, about 40 miles northeast of Boston. To the best of my knowledge, the only speciality coffee on Cape Ann is that which I am making in our rental house (I brought some coffee from Catalyst and Five Elephant with me), although there is a coffee shop and roastery I'm looking forward to checking out in Ipswich.

Update (August 2017): Rather than creating a new guide following my return to Boston and Cambridge in July and August 2017, I've added the three new coffee shops I visited — Broadsheet Coffee, Gracenote and George Howell at Boston Public Market — to this post and map. Read on for more Massachusetts specialty coffee delights!


As I mentioned in my last post, I used to travel to Boston fairly frequently but hadn't been to the city for almost a decade until a conference took me there last week. I was just starting to get into specialty coffee back in 2007 and I don't think Boston had yet hopped onto the third wave, although I did find this photo in my archives, which I took at Caffè Vittoria — an almost-90-year-old Italian cafe (caffè, technically) in the North End — in December 2005. It may be my first ever 'arty' photo of a cup of coffee, although I hadn't yet got the hang of bokeh.

The main motivation for my current work trip to the US was to attend a conference in Boston. I have a soft spot for Beantown as it was the first US city I ever visited, on a family holiday back in 1993. I went back four or five more times over the next decade and a half but as work took me increasingly to San Francisco and DC, and the attractions of New York won me over, I began to neglect Boston and I haven't been back since 2007 (some of my adventures on my last trip are documented on this blog, the recent 10th anniversary of which I realised that I have forgotten to celebrate).

I have come to the conclusion that when I am by myself, I am unable to relax - if relaxation is defined in conventional ways (lying down (or at least, sitting down), chilling, listening to music as a primary activity, being lazy, etc.). After five hectic holiday days in New York and Boston, I decided to take it easy today. It was also 32 degrees and swelteringly sticky in the city so I took the commuter train out to the idyllic countryside town of Concord, Mass.

I spent much of today in the People's Republic of Cambridge, to give it its full title. And oout of respect for my father, I thought I ought to engage in some historical activities while here (though to be fair, I probably did them all when I came in 1993, 1997, 2001 and 2005).

Despite the genuinely concerned warnings I received about my decision to travel from New York to Boston by Greyhound ($30) rather than train ($85), the journey wasn't really too bad. The worst part is the fact that it requires leaving from Port Authority in NYC, which is reminiscent of Birmingham New Street but without the charm. It is huge and sprawling with many different wings and spiral staircases descending further down into lower circles of Dante's hell.