fluking This weekend was worth the nearly-six-hour bus trip on Friday evening and the returnus interruptus of Sunday. As one of my birthday gifts, my parents sent Stuart and I to Gloucester (GLOU-cester! if I’m being irritating), Massachusetts, to go out on the Hurricane II, a whale-watching boat. It was a four hour trip and you may roll your eyes at my/our geekiness, but it’s my second trip to the Stellwagen Bank to watch the humpbacks do their 40-ton thing.
It was awesome. I’m obviously married to the right person because Stuart thought it was awesome, too. We saw about 20 different humpbacks, one of them a calf, and watched them nap and play on the surface. Stuart even saw one of them breaching, but I missed it.
colorfulFrom four hours on the boat in Gloucester, we popped over to Rockport to get some coffee and wander along the exceedingly cute wharf – all these little shops selling knick-knacks and “local art”. Gloucester was more a working town, with a cute but functional Main Street, but Rockport was clearly more touristy. I loved the houses in Rockport though, and Stuart might actually have gotten sick of me nearly crashing the car on Route 128 to slow down and look at them.
Then, with only one purchase from the kitschy wharf (delicious apple strudel to take home to my parents), we went home and relaxed over dinner with my parents, waking up the next day to barbeque with them in honor of me! Turning 26! TOMORROW! There was obviously cake.
zuppa ingleseThere will be more cake tomorrow, when I drag all my friends to a cute little bistro in Queens to celebrate with me and eat strawberry shortcake, yes oh yes, because it’s my birthday. Perhaps there will come an age where a whole day dedicated to feeling special and important topped off with cake will cease to excite me, but I hope I never get to that age. Wait, no, that sounds tragic – I hope I sail blissfully by the point where people stop caring about birthdays.
I love birthdays! So I’ll be 26 tomorrow. Isn’t that neat?
Unrelated to how neat my birthday is (AND IT IS), I get this strange sort of nostalgia every time we visit New England. Rhode Island counts too, of course, but going to Providence is all about visiting my parents and so my delight in the town is tied up in them. But we’ve been three times now – once, our honeymoon in Bar Harbor, last fall for camping in the Berkshires, and now to Cape Ann – and I’m not sure I can describe how happy the entire region makes me. Not so much the big cities (Boston, I’m looking at YOU) but the smaller towns and the coast and the mountains and the people and the seasons. I love it, love it, love it.
Who knows if we’ll ever leave the city. I mean, we love it here, we have a home and a family of friends and good jobs. Even for someone like me, who’s never imagined spending her whole life anywhere, I can see myself never leaving New York City.
But if we did, I hope it’d be for someplace like New England.

Advertisement