A day with Mom

This past weekend my mom and I went on a trip up to Rockport, MA to have a mother/daughter day, see my mom is going to Finland today for 5 weeks because my grandmother is turning 90 and she needs some help and she refuses any. Needless to say mom needs to go there, to take care of some things, so I had suggested a couple of weeks ago, that we do something fun/special just the two of us on the Sunday before she leaves. We picked Rockport.

Rockport, is this quaint little town on the Northern Coast of MA on the Cape Ann peninsula. It was a perfect day too, not too hot no too cool, we get there late morning and walk around and check out all the stores. We buy some Pulla which is a wonderful yummy bread that comes from Finland. I usually make the rolls myself but haven't done so in a while, I think it might be time. We buy some elephant ears, (no not real elephant just a fried dough that is very delicious). There is this one gallery in Rockport that has some of the best landscape pictures I've ever seen, unfortunately I can't think of its name. The one thing I love about Rockport is it feels like a small Scandinavian village. The houses are small, and very close together.

I took a picture of a street that I just thought was so beautiful the way the houses lined up.

A fisherman's shack on Bradley Wharf in the harbor of Rockport has been duplicated in photos and art so many times that it is considered the most recognizable picture in the world.

This is a photo of it (I took this off the web because we didn't take a picture of it I know what was I thinking).

After touring and walking around Rockport we head over to the Halibut Point State Park, this is where my mom used to go when I was sick. She said that sometimes she just needed to be by herself, she found this place to come, to sit, to think and just be alone. I know my mom went through so much while I was going through treatment, it was not easy for her to watch her only child fight for her life. So I was very grateful and appreciative when she said she wanted to show me her favorite place.

The park was formerly the Babson Farm granite quarry, beginning in the 1840s, granite was quarried from this area, first on a small scale and primarily along the coast, and then on a much larger scale when the Rockport Granite Company acquired the Babson Farm quarry and expanded its operation. Shortly after the Cape Ann granite industry collapsed in 1929, 17 acres on the eastern side of the quarry were purchased and given to the Trustees of Reservations. The remainder of the area sat unused until late in World War II when a fire control tower (now the park's Visitors Center) was constructed to provide aiming information for the massive coastal defense guns that guarded Boston and Portsmouth Harbors.

This is of the quarry

This is the fire control tower

After walking around the quarry, we headed down the trail to the beach.

Mom turn around and say CHEESE!!

When we got down the trail we have to hike on all these rocks to get to where my mom would sit and think. It was so beautiful and peaceful.

Me in deep thoughts. (I'm shocked that I just hiked on all these rocks!)

These rocks are very high up from the beach, actually there isn't really a beach, its just rocks and ocean. In the picture you can't tell but they were at least 40 feet up. When we were sitting I was about to take a picture and dropped my mom's filter cap on her camera and it dropped WAAAYYYY down between the rocks. Again sorry about that mom.

Here are a couple more pictures of the surf and some fisherman.

Once we left the park we headed to Gloucester to go for lunch the food was great, the drinks were better but what was the best was us watching these two people try to dance to a Brazilian band, it was hysterical (I took a video of them, but I can't post it, cuz I'm just not that mean). After lunch we get into the car and head home we took a detour by the beach to check out if the festival was still going on. While we were driving on the road by the beach, this seagull decides that he wants to walk across the street. So he does, he actually is in the cross walk and all the cars stop to let him cross, he waddles across with this look of arrogance as if to say, "that's right I'm in the cross walk so you all have to stop." (If my camera hadn't been in the back I would have tried to get its picture). My mom and I just lost it, we laughed the rest of the way home. It was a perfect way to end a perfect day.