REI Sale!

We took a trip to Boston recently. We do this 2x per year for one specific reason: the REI Garage Sale!!!!! Seriously, it's worth the drive. And, Boston is a cool place to visit, so we make it a long weekend.

We usually go to 3 REIs at each trip since the area REIs typically have their sales on the same day. We arrived at 5:00am at an REI we hadn't been to. It was in a large shopping complex.

There was no one else around, and there was eerie classical music playing on loudspeakers. It seemed like the perfect scene for a horror movie, but we enjoyed the soundtrack and the wait. It didn't turn out to be all that necessary to wait, but we consider that to be part of the experience.

We were hoping to get an aerodynamic car top cargo box. We're taking a long road trip this summer, and we're gonna need it b/c we're going to have a mattress in our car (car camping!). We got exactly what we wanted, and for WAY less than it would have cost brand new. Seriously these things go for $500-600, and we paid $120. Wahoo!

That find alone made the trip worth it.

We went up to the Gloucester area and checked out the Rocky Neck Art Colony.

Most of the studios were closed b/c their summer season hadn't started yet, but it was cool.

After that we went to Stage Fort Park, donned our newly purchased Vibram 5-finger shoes and rock scrambled.

We got them for $10 each, and man are they helpful in rock scrambling and such.

You can grip with you're toes! We weren't sure how we would like the separated toes, but for certain things I love them. We've been using them for swimming a lot lately (more on that later), and they're awesome! I feel a lot more secure climbing waterfalls and such.

We watched the fog roll in before we started the trek home.

On the way home, we made a stop at the Eric Carle Museum. You might wonder who Eric Carle is, but this picture should help clear that up:

Who hasn't heard of the Very Hungry Caterpillar?! Erica Carle is the illustrator of that book, and several other kids books you'd recognize. The museum turned out to be a waste of money (it just wasn't worth the cost), but we didn't know that until we were in there, so we made the most of it.

We drove the back roads for a good bit of the way back to Ithaca, and it was so much fun! We saw small towns and things that we totally would have missed if we had just jumped on I 90. I think we'll explore a little more of Massachusetts on our next trip!