Heavenly Hiking at Halibut Point

Where to go on our 10-year anniversary? After contemplating things to do on our own, without Jordyn ... New York City, Foxwoods Casino ... we decided to take our little girl with us wherever that might be. We settled on Newport, R.I., for a day of cliff walking and kite flying -- only we had to nix it when we discovered that it was Folk Festival weekend. So now where? Eventually, after considering museums, aquariums and what not, I surfed the Massachusetts DCR page and found Halibut Point State Park in Rockport.

Part of what attracted me was the drive -- I love road trips and I'd never visited this remote-looking area that juts out from the North Shore outside of Boston. Sara had been to the scenic seaside town with her family, but it had been years, and she was all for it. We could hit another state park on our Weekends in the Woods quest and then scarf down some seafood.

I do love the way this sort of "checklist" travel brings me to places I might otherwise overlook. It's not a spot where Sara had gone on her family's visits to Cape Ann. Halibut Point is a true beauty, though definitely not in the woodsy wonder sense of a typical state park. Nope, instead it combines a serene pool, bordered by massive granite ledges of what used to be a 19th-century quarry, with the rocky Atlantic Ocean shore.

A renovated World War II fire tower serves as the visitor center for this state park gem, which is managed by the DCR and the Trustees of Reservations, and you can pick up a map for taking the self-guided loop tour around the quarry. There are nine stops that provide some historical reference into the granite trade, and if you're a dork like me you take time to read the history blurbs aloud to your embarrassed wife and daughter. The cooler thing to do is embrace the danger of standing right at the edge of the granite ledges and trying not to lose your sunglasses as you look down to the water. 

Even better than the stroll around the quarry was the lookout point over the Atlantic, where you can see New Hampshire and Maine (not so much on the hazy afternoon we went), and walk down to the shore. Halibut Point has an incredible rock cairn garden, where visitors have constructed the most elaborate cairn formations I've seen, like the arch shown, a rock penguin and other architectural sculptures -- Jordyn really dug this area and added her own stone bridge. After that we hopped along the big, barnacle- and seaweed-covered rocks by the water, where Jordyn plucked snails (pictured at left) from the crevices. Her day was made when she lured them out of their shells by humming -- a trick she learned about only a couple of weeks earlier. A modern-day siren of the sea! (Arlen)