Ok, I know the image today isn’t the perfect photo, if there even exists such a thing, but I couldn’t resist the name.  If you didn’t put the two together, Gloucester is the location for the movie “The Perfect Storm.”   You see?  I love disaster movies. I can, and usually do, watch “The Towering Inferno,” “Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake,” etc., every time they’re on TV.  I think I like them because I like putting myself into the different, crazy situations and wonder what I would do. I get so mad when they make stupid decisions, but love to guess how I’d react to the same thing. How would you handle the screaming, out-of-control women who are always in these flicks?

They also tend to have happy endings. Well, maybe not happy as mostly everyone dies other than the main character(s), but at least a heroic story of survival concludes most of them.

“The Perfect Storm” is different for a disaster movie, however.  First, it is based on a true story.  Of course poetic license is used to create a script that Hollywood would go for, but the movie mimics the real life disaster that Gloucester-based lobster boat, The Andrea Gail, had to deal with back in 1991. The other reason it’s different, and makes that last point even more important: The boat was never found and there was no happy ending.  Every time I watch, I wonder what it was really like for those seaport families as they waited anxiously for their loved ones to come home and then the realization that they wouldn’t be.  It would be different if it was just a script, but the reality behind it changes that.

The Perfect Photo – Gloucester, MA

So, a few years ago, when a friend invited me to his place in York, Maine for the night, I decided to take him up on it and also turn it into a mini photo trip.  I took off early from work on Friday September 30th, 2010. Once I left CT, I jumped off the highway and road the coastline north towards Maine.  I wasn’t too sure how long anything would take, so I never planned out where i would stop. Just noted some possibilities that looked good on a map. This freed me from worrying about time whenever I did stop (rushing to take a photo seldom works out great), but I saw that Gloucester was along the way, so I made sure that there would be time for that.

The weather wasn’t great that day, so I passed over some of the earlier stops I had circled.  When I made it to Gloucester, I had more than enough time to explore. Unfortunately, the weather still wasn’t the greatest, but I thought that to be appropriate for the first time I visited the town once devastated by bad weather so many years earlier.

I drove around for a while until I found a good place to park and then grabbed my gear and went off on foot.  I needed my umbrella to keep everything dry, and of course make everything harder to carry, but eventually found a bridge that allowed me to look out over all the boats in the water and houses along the sides.  I couldn’t help but to think back to that earlier time…

Tomorrow I will continue this 24 hour trip to Maine with an image of Nubble Lighthouse.