A relaxing weekend off?

I work for AAA, and sometimes we get a few perks.  This weekend, I had the chance to stay at a hotel that had just been bought by a new company.  They wanted to show us their facility, and what better way than to let us have a free night there.

The hotel has a water park inside.....so they gave us a free night, plus a pass to the water park, plus free breakfast.

Since Hubby and I have been working so hard on our renovation, I thought it would be nice if we made this a "non-working" weekend.  So we made plans to visit the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Cape Ann Art Museum while we were down in that neck of the woods.

We headed out Saturday morning and went to the Peabody first.   It was a nice museum, but have to say not a favorite.  It had a somewhat eclectic mix of displays, mostly Asian art, but some American art, Maritime stuff and a special exhibit that was so bizarre I cannot describe it.

Thankfully, a friend told me not to miss the Chinese House, so we made sure we paid the extra $5 apiece and went in.  It was pretty cool that they took a 200 year old house from China and brought it here to Massachusetts and re-assembled it on the grounds of the Museum.   We took a walk outside down to Pickering Wharf as well.

We checked into the hotel, I did my "mandatory" tour, and we went out to dinner.  After dinner, we figured we'd spend an hour at the water park.   When I went on the tour earlier, the park was absolutely packed with kids and families.  Thankfully, when we went back at 8pm it was quieter, and we got to try out the slides and the lazy river for an hour.  

Sunday morning we had our breakfast and then took off for Gloucester for the Cape Ann Museum.  Unfortunately, we didn't realize that it didn't open until 1pm.   (You'd think our AAA counselor would have picked up on that.)  

So we decided to drive over to the waterfront and walk over to Stage Fort Park.   On the way to the waterfront, we found the Gloucester Main Street, which we'd never even realized was there.   Since we had so much time, why not get out and walk up and down and see which little shops were open?   Unbelievably, Hubby found a used record store!!!  I'm sure he could have spent hours in there, but he browsed for a little while and came up with ten records he had to have!!

The waterfront turned out to be so cold we couldn't stand it, so we stopped at a little diner to use the bathroom and have a cup of coffee - and a little bit to eat since we felt bad going in there just to use their bathroom and drink coffee.

Finally we went to the Cape Ann Museum which was a very nice museum.   Lots of Maritime stuff as well, but a great display of young people's work that I enjoyed.

All in all, not the most relaxing weekend, but so wonderful to spend time with Hubby doing something other than sanding, painting, cleaning, building, etc etc etc!!