The Gloucester Report

Another great trip to Gloucester is officially in the books.  We did some new stuff, some old stuff and got to hug babies.  Everybody is doing well and send their best wishes back this way.  We got to take Tim to Cape Ann Brewing for lunch.  He'd never been so it was great fun to introduce him to one of our Gloucester favorites.  We saw Kevin briefly to say hello and he seems to be doing fairly well.  Emmy told us some stories about their most recent trip to Ireland all the while STRONGLY encouraging us to accompany them to Ireland in the near future.  Cathy and Chris are great--and I don't need to tell you how wonderful it was to spend time with Julia, Calvin and Claire. 

One of the new things we did was sign up for a guided tour of "the Island" (as our guide calls Gloucester--technically I guess he has a point since you must cross a bridge in order to get there).  I wanted to see Dogtown and the Babson Boulders I've heard so much about.  Good thing we had a guide--there is no way on Earth we'd have found them and then found our way home again by ourselves.  As the guide told the story, Dogtown was the center of town in the early days occupied by many fishermen widows and their dogs.  It's very far from the water and absolutely in the middle of the woods. 

The Babson Boulders are huge pieces of granite carved with words of wisdom.  Apparently Mr. Babson hired some out of work men during the Depression for this and there are a little over a dozen of them.  Here's an example.  Maybe you can see it's kind of desolate.

On our own, we decided to go find Crane Wildlife Refuge and ended up at Crane Beach on Sunday morning to find we weren't alone on the beach:

It's a massive beach and there were probably about a dozen horses getting their morning walks on the beach.  It was really cool.  Literally and figuratively. 

Here's another view of the beach.  I think this is a really neat shot.

Good bye for now!  More cool finds to follow in a day or so.