#94- Ride 4 of 8 Antique Carousels in MA
Massachusetts is home to 8 antique carousel rides. Some are far away so I put our goal for this summer to ride 1/2 of them. Maybe next summer's list will be to ride the other half. Tonight we drove to Hull to Nantasket Beach. The old amusement park that used to be there is gone but this carousel remains from those long ago days. The inside of the building was crowded with overpriced souvenoir crap to buy. Really crowded with it. Maybe I'm spoiled from Pawtucket's Looff Carousel down the street from us. Their rides are 25 cents each and go super fast. The rides in Hull were $2.25 and lasted a while but didn't go nearly as fast. Not fast enough to keep you cool on a hot, summer day. At least not this momma.
#73- Ride a carousel horse
A nice thing about this carousel is that 3 out of 4 horses in each row moved up & down. On some carousel rides, the horses don't move which is kind of poopy. This one in Hull had 4 horses across each row and the only that didn't move up & down was the outside one.
Becca, with her love of horses, had a grand ole time. She kept hollering, "Horsey, horsey!" The boys both enjoyed the ride also. Joe rode another horse and Dan rode in one of the chariots. Each time he'd go around, by the time he got to John who was taking pictures, he'd move to another spot within the chariot. It was funny.
# 81- Go to an old beach
Last summer when we went to Nantasket to go swimming, it was disgusting! Absolutely disgusting and I said we'd never go back. I didn't bring anyone's bathing suit, partly for this reason and partly because we didn't leave our house till 4pm on a Friday afternoon to head down route 3 to Hull. After riding the carousel, we walked around the cheesiest Harborwalk in New England. There were signs designating it as a Harborwalk, but basically all it was was a walk through a parking lot and marina.
From our cheesy walk, we headed back across the road to the beach. Becca had begged to see the beach. When we got up to the seawall, we saw it was high tide. Just like it always is when we go to the beach. (I really need to start checking the tide times before we head out). Some people were in the ocean swimming but a bunch of teenage boys were standing in the water, holding onto the cement wall of the ramp that brings you down to beach level. They had their backs to the ocean, waiting for a wave to come in. When the wave crashed into the wall it would send a wall of water straight up about 10 feet that would come crashing down on the boys, soaking them. It was a riot watching them. The way they were standing against the wall, waiting for the wave, made it look like the cops had pulled them over and they were waiting to be frisked. When the wave did crash down on them, they would burst out laughing and chuckling.
Of course, watching this made the kids want to do it too. Being a mother, all I could vision was my children either getting smashed into the seawall and getting really hurt or a giant rip tide sucking them out into the open ocean, drowning them because I was too far away, being up on the sidewalk above and 50 yards away from the beach access entrance. Finally, I pushed my anxiety aside and let John take them down the ramp with explicit instructions not to get wet. Well, you can see from the photos how well he listened.
It was hard to get mad when they were all having so much fun. Giggles, laughter, big ear-to-ear grins, shrieks of delight. It's times like this that make me happy to be a mom. And happy to be the mom of these three kids. It makes the sibling bickering and yelling and fighting and tattle-tailing, the "mom, she touched me!, "mom he poked me!" "mom, she looked at me!" comments disappear. I'm reminded that nothing is as important as a child's happiness. And that sometimes all it takes for a child to be happy is family love and togetherness and the bending of some rules.
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| My Joseph, future heartbreaker of America. |
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