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Sep 5, 2021

Traveling Together - Blackstone River Valley

I actually love trip planning. I look for things to do and places to go so that the kids (and me!) can learn about our history or our family or science or something about our amazing world. So Friday was a travel day; the day we said goodbye to the Berkshires and drove across Massachusetts to our 2nd condo. It was also the absolute last day of the entire trip that I planned. Other than flights and stuff, it was also the very first day of our trip that I planned. 

One Sunday afternoon several months ago, I got a text from Family Search telling me I had a several greats-grandmother buried in a cemetery in MA called Quabbin Park. When I told my sweetie, he suggested we put a visit into our travel plans, so after packing everything up and heading out, we drove straight to Quabbin Park... sort of.

It was way off on a winding country road and when we found it, we were surprised to discover that it was massive! Many smaller cemeteries had been relocated to this place when they built the reservoir and without a directory, all we could do was wander. We were on the verge of giving up when Curly suggested we try one last little corner...

Sometimes it is so satisfying to connect with the past.

It is also satisfying to try something new. I scoured the internet to find one of those little trolley car diners because I thought it would be fun to show the kids what can be accomplished in tight quarters. I finally found one called Miss Worcester's Dinner. It was in a rather seedy part of town and my sweetie really didn't want us to eat there, but he loves me and puts up with my craziness. 

After we finished though, he made a beeline for the freeway. 

Something I didn't know was that the Industrial Revolution was mostly started in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a little area called the Blackstone River Valley and we happened to be driving right through it, so we stopped at a little place called the Farm. 

It used to be a working dairy farm until the upstairs was made into a museum that told us all about the river and how goods were pulled up and down making trade and industry easier.

After touring the museum we went for a stroll along the canal. 

Curly was trying to teach Baby Doll how to skip stones on the water. 

My sweetie and I moved slowly on the rough path all the way to the stone bridge. 

It was so beautiful!

We sat for a while under the trees and watched the water roll off a tiny ledge where it began to move much faster. Curly's best stone skipped 7 times.

Then it was time to go. 

My sweetie wanted to get to Mashpee ahead of traffic. We needed to get settled. Saturday promised to be a very long day.

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