2015 Denise's States Trip- Rhode Island and Connecticut

This is Tim...by the way.  Today we woke up in a Holiday Inn Express in Warwick, Rhode Island.  They put us in a disability room after looking at us and asking us how much we have been eating.  They thought that we needed wide doors and handles to support ourselves.  And we would not be able to lift ourselves into a tub.  Turned out well. It is hard to believe that one week ago I was dieting...and today...well...life is good again.  But we will hit the diet thing hard once we are home!  Too much to try and taste while we travel about.

 

Our day started with one of the standard breakfast affairs.  After eating, we had to make some decisions about when to leave this area.  Since we rented the car in Boston, we have to return the car to Boston as a drop fee in this area is about $200.  In reality, that seems cheap if you look at the cost of hotels in the Boston area.   Hotels with shuttles and such run around $300 to $500 per night.  I saw a Motel 6 for $180!  Crazy.  So we decided that we will leave tomorrow and catch an11:40 AM flight to Newark and then ‘hope’ to get on to Buffalo.  The EWR to BUF flights are small...and close to being sold out.  But we have learned that you just never know.  The trick, however, will be to get to Boston since we re-booked another night here in Warwick...which is about 50 miles from the airport.  We’ll be driving through Providence and Boston traffic to get there.  We’re giving ourselves about 2.5 hours to get there.  We shall see.

 

We left the hotel at about 10 AM and headed into Providence to see the government buildings there.  We went into the RI Capitol with a million school kids.  It sounded like a beehive in there.  As are most capitols, it was quite the beautiful building.  In the Senate room, they were doing a cool thing with the students.  Each student was at a Senator’s desk.  They had some ‘officials’ up on the stand discussing a bill to eliminate ‘School Snow Day Makeups’.  It was fun to hear the kids explain why and why not that would be a good thing.  Pretty memorable for the children.

 

After leaving the capitol, we drove around the downtown area of Providence and up one of the hills to Brown University.  Pretty nice campus.  Pretty area.  We then headed to I95 again to drive down to New London, Connecticut.  Denise found out that there were some lighthouses there.  We used the GPS to load one of the addresses.  We followed it into New London.  But when it deposited us in the middle of a neighborhood, we realized that the GPS had failed.  We then used coordinates to track to it...it was just around the corner.  We then found ourselves on some private beaches.  Even the lighthouse was a private building.  So we got out, walked the beach and took a few quick pictures.  

And then we were off again...this time to find a bathroom and food.  We ended up at a couple of ‘food’ shacks.  But first, Denise ran crazily into a Real Estate office begging to use their facilities.  They were really nice ane let her empty her bladder.  I ended up with an extremely expensive lobster roll and Denise ordered clam chowder hoping it was of the New England variety.  However, it was the RI variety.  I thought it was really good...but more like a chicken soup only with clams. Denise was not overly impressed. 

 This is the view from where we ate lunch. Stunning. 

After lunch, we then began to struggle on what to do next.  We decided to drive to another coastal town called North Kingstown.  We thought we would just check it out.  We got there.  But while driving, we learned that a ferry left from there to go to Marsha’s Vineyard.   We both kind of got excited about doing that although the price was a bit steep.  But upon calling them a few times, we learned that it does not start running until June 5^th.  We were bummed out a bit.  So we had to stop and get some ice cream from a nice shop in the middle of nowhere.  

We then decided that we would go to a movie....which we did.  It turned out to be a pretty good show.  It was called, ‘Far From The Madding Crowd'.  We have no idea why it was named that...but it was a good movie.  

After the movie, we decided that we would look up a ‘Fish and Chips’ place.  The same restaurant kept popping up on our devices.  So off we went.  It was about 5 miles away.  As we winded into neighborhoods, it started to feel similar to what happened to us earlier...a dead end.  But no...we pull into this tiny strip mall in the middle of a neighborhood only to find out this good place is only open for dinner on Fridays.  We should have called.  We then looked up another place...but as we were driving, we called.  No one answered.  So we decided to head back to the hotel.  But as we were driving, we came across a nice looking place just a few blocks from our hotel.  We swung into it and had a nice dinner...pretty good food.

 

After dinner, we came back to the hotel and listed ourselves on flights.  We then headed to the hot tub to soak a little while and now I’m blogging.   But I need to get to bed to get some sleep.

 

Denise and I both said to each other that this has been an amazing adventure that we will always remember.  But we are tired and burning out.  We are excited to see Michael and his family in Buffalo.   But we are ready to get home.

 

Wish us luck for tomorrow!

 

2015 Denise's States Trip- West Virginia and Boston

I'm writing this post as I sit on the plane on the runway at Dulles (Washington DC). We weren't able to get seats on flights to Connecticut or Rhode Island so we are heading to Boston and renting a car and then driving down to both states.  I love Boston and so my trip might be longer than planned:-)

A little about our day. As I said yesterday, we are eating our way through this trip and so I told Tim to wake me up and I would go to the workout room with him. I was doing well and had done about 30 minutes on the machines when I decided to do some strength training with the weights. I went to trade the weights that I had in my hand and I tripped over the cord for the tread mill and went flying into the rack of weights and the wall. I swear I broke 3 of my fingers. They hurt so bad and started to swell up immediately. My knuckle was bleeding. What a mess. It goes to show what I've said all along. I am allergic to working out! Tim got some ice and made me put my whole hand in it for 5 minutes. Absolute  torture, but I'm sure it helped. I got a bandage and some ibuprofen and I'm good to go.

Before our work out.

My hand after. 

Finishing the blog from yesterday before we left for the day. 

Our first stop was the war memorial. It was very well done. It had all the names of those lost during wars from West Virginia. 

Next we went to the West Virginia state museum. It was awesome. So informative, huge and free. How do you beat that? We learned all sorts of cool facts about West Virginia.

Then we went and toured the capitol building. It is the biggest one I've ever seen. One of the workers said it is the house that coal built. WV has a huge history with coal mining and the big money they got from it. The people here are so friendly. They ask where we're from and offer suggestions on what we need to see. It might help that Tim is a walking advertisement of where we are from. Yesterday as we sat at the airport trying to book a rental car and hotel a young man looked at Tim and said "are you from utah?" I couldn't figure out how he knew this until he said that he saw Tim's Weber State golf shirt that he had on. Today the same thing happened only it was his Utah Jazz golf shirt!

This river is across the street from the Capitol. It goes all the way through town and there are a ton of bridges to connect the 2 sides of the city. 

We paid for parking at a meter. We knew we were getting close to the time it would expire and so we were hurrying back. We saw the meter police checking meters a few cars down from ours and so we ran to get ahead of him. Sure enough our meter had just expired. If we had been one minute later we would have gotten a parking ticket. Great timing on our part!

Pretty flower in the trees by the Capitol. 

My last view of West Virginia. I tried and tried to capture the green, tree filled hills all around me. This is the best I could do.

Then we headed to the airport. Tim is always researching and looking at flights, hotels and rental cars. 

It was so cold while we were waiting for the shuttle bus to the rental car center that you could see your breath. Tim kept showing it to me, but I couldn't catch it on film. 

The shuttle bus was so crowded. It was cozy to say the least!

I love the tunnels you drive through all around Boston. 

I know you can't see this because my camera couldn't handle the dark night and the moving car, but this says Rhode Island welcomes me. I'll try to get a better picture tomorrow. 

I know that no one will believe, but I am working hard on this trip. Navigating is a tough job. Sometimes I have 2 GPS's working at a time so I can track places to eat plus the way to the hotel. Look at that bruise from my fall this morning. My ibuprofen has worn off and my fingers are killing me. 

2015 Denise's States Trip- West Virginia

Today started way too early and didn't go as planned at all. I don't think Tim even slept 2 hours. Poor man. Remember how I said you need a plan A, B and C when traveling standby? Well, I discovered this morning that you need even more plans sometimes. Sometime during the night our flight to DC that looked really good ended up with 15 more passengers on it. Don't ask me where they came from. I'll probably never know. We got up at 3:45 am anyway and hoped we were wrong. We were in the lobby waiting for the shuttle 30 minutes later and at the airport by 4:30ish. We were right. We didn't get on that flight. We noticed that the standby lists for all the flights were incredibly long. Must be the kids are out of school or lots of people commute for work. Who knows. We were desperately looking for any way out of this town. Everything looked hopeless when we noticed a flight delayed for several hours going to Houston. That is hugely out of our way but people were changing to other flights so they could make their connections and that allowed us to slip in! It's strange how excited we were to go the wrong direction, but that's how we felt. Luckily there were a couple of seats to Charleston, West Virginia leaving 90 minutes later from Houston. We were so happy to get to west Virginia even though it is 7 hours later than we had planned. 

I loved seeing West Virginia from the window of the plane. Absolutely stunning. Trees and rolling hills everywhere. Probably the greenest I've ever seen. It is raining again. We have picked rainy days to be a lot of places. It is colder than usual here they are saying, too. 

On the plane I was tapped on the shoulder by this cute girl. She is Evelyn and is from Puebla, Mexico. She was dying to try out her broken English and decided I looked friendly enough. It was a very funny hour and a half as she kept asking me questions and I would try to answer in words she could understand. A lot of smiling and head nodding. She is coming to West Virginia for a month to study at the university of charleston. She was with a group of 4 teachers and 11 students. None of them spoke very good English. She was so loving and adorable and I'm so glad she approached me. I ended up trying to converse with many in the group. She asked to have this picture taken with me and thanked me profusely for being such a nice person. So glad I could meet her. 

This airport is so small that you deplane right on the runway. It was funny watching people try to figure out how to get in the terminal as there wasn't anything marking the path. The first people wandered around a bit and then ended up knocking on a door to get let in to the terminal. Fun to watch as we were waiting for our bags. 

 Is 

I try so hard to find these signs in each state. I love them. 

The rocky sides of the road are so beautiful. 

Our cute rental car. It is pretty new. 

Lots of beautiful flowers around this town. 

Charleston is a very religious town. We found a baptist temple, a catholic school and church and huge church buildings for the united Methodist, episcapallian, and Lutheran churches. Beautiful buildings. 

When we hit a new town I always ask the airport, hotel and rental car employees where is good to eat and what we should try and see. I have to say, they have never led us wrong. We ate at the Bluegrass Cafe and it was delicious. We are eating our way through all of these states. I say enjoy it while we are here and then hit the diet hard when we get home. Tim pretty much agrees. This is a picture of the cheese fondue. We wanted to lick the bowl. 

This is a terrible picture, but a funny memory. I have to dye my roots on my hair every 2-3 weeks. Normally I try to time it so I'm ok on vacation, but this time I was more worried about not having gray roots for preschool graduation.  I knew that the gray would make me crazy while we were traveling and so I thought I'd pack the stuff and then if I found the time I'd just do it in the hotel. Well, late last night I decided was a good time. I am happy to say it worked awesomely and I am now gray free!

I want to say a few words about how fun it is to live out of a carry on bag for 16 days. I'm so tired of the clothes I packed that I might burn them when I get home. I packed some of my favorite clothes and now I hate them:-) I've felt this way after every long trip I've taken, so I know it will be ok. It feels like my suitcase is shrinking each day as I load it up to move on to my next destination even though I haven't bought anything new. Don't ask me how that is, it just is.