Girls' Weekend 2018, Rhode Island

Sunrise at Newark airport

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Ahhhhhhh.  Girls' weekend.  My favorite, favorite "weekend" of the year.  (This is in quotation marks because it has now become nearly a week, but we try and keep this on the down low.)  And, another aside, Kathi and I just had a discussion about whether it is really necessary for the apostrophe after the word "girls" when referring to these adventures (this is how nerdy we are).  Conclusion, yes it IS necessary, because it belongs to us, therefore  the possessive form of the plural best describes how we feel about these weekends (oh my god, we are such nerds).

Ok, moving on.  Girls' weekend.  Last year we were in Maine and the toss of the states has brought us to Rhode Island this year.   After doing some research we chose to home base out of Providence rather than Newport for this trip.  We considered making this a 2 state trip but decided there are so many interesting things to do and see in Rhode Island that we would just "do" Rhode Island.  But Rhode Island IS a very small state.  It is 37 miles wide and 48 miles  top to bottom.

So, I began this Girls' weekend by leaving work on Wednesday, October 3 and driving straight up to Portland airport to catch an all night flight to Newark, New Jersey and from there to Providence.  Kathi's adventure began with a 5:17am flight out of Indianapolis to Philadelphia, then on to Providence.  Kathi was up until 1 am finishing up some homework (yes, the crazy woman is BACK in school again, this time in pursuit of her PhD) and packing,  then up at 3 am to make the drive to the airport.  Needless to say we were both a bit sleepy upon arrival.  However, the excitement of Girls' weekend and seeing one another kicked in and we got a second wind when we met up at the airport.

I booked an adorable apartment for us through Air BNB for our stay.  It is in an historic home in a very diverse neighborhood here in Providence.  While our hosts, Desi and Eric, were kind enough to allow us a bit of an early check in, we still had a couple of hours to kill before we could do so, so we found a cute little restaurant, aptly named The Diner (an actual old dining car),  in which to have breakfast.  We ate a wonderful breakfast, drank a lot of coffee and caught up on one anothers' lives.  We paid the bill at 11:57 & drove to our apartment which is only a few minutes away, where we met Desi who gave us the tour and handed us the keys.  This place is amazing, particularly when compared to the place where we stayed last year in Booth Bay Harbor (see blog for last year's trip for a description of our place there).  A FULL apartment, that has a kitchen and everything!!

We settled in and decided to just kind of hang out for the day and maybe catch a nap to make up for the lost sleep of the night before.  Kathi set up her computer and started in on some homework, while I stretched out on one of the two couches in our living room to try and nap.  Once I realized this wasn't going to happen I decided to make a run to the nearest grocery store to get a few staples as well as ingredients to make us dinner.  Desi had told us when giving us the tour that we were welcome to use anything that was in the refrigerator or cupboards and upon finding NINE cans of tuna in the cupboard I decided to make tuna noodle casserole for dinner. (are these people survivalists or something?)   Kathi stayed put to get work done while I ventured out to the nearest grocery store.  Three hours later, I finally arrived back in our apartment with the items on our list.  Holy cow, finding the "nearest" grocery store became an adventure all unto itself!  Kathi had asked Siri to find the nearest grocery store and one called Westminster Food Mart seemed to be the closest.  I could not find it.  Google Maps told me I drove past it twice, but I never saw it.  Now, one thing you need to know is that when looking up grocery stores there were none of that had familiar names.  No Safeways, Krogers that kind of thing.  So, I looked up nearby grocery stores and decided to go to one called Price Right.  Oh my gosh.  Upon walking in I immediately thought I don't know if I'm going to be able to find everything I want here.  Turns out that Price Rights are a kind of discount warehouse grocery store.  The produce section was set up strangely, the aisles were set up strangely and I couldn't find many of the things that were on my list.  For example, I needed cream of celery soup for my tuna noodle casserole and when I arrived in the soup aisle there were not many options in the way of soup and there was NO Campbell's soup at all. WHAT KIND OF GROCERY STORE DOESN"T HAVE CAMPBELL'S SOUP???  Then when I got to the coffee aisle, all they had was Maxwell House and Folgers. 

Since Kathi and I are Starbucks gals,  Maxwell House and Folgers are just not acceptable.  I texted Kathi to relate what I was finding to her and she texted me back to let me know that she happened to be talking with Desi at that moment and Desi said I should go to Stop & Shop instead and provided Kathi with an address which Kathi texted to me.  When I put that address into Google maps, it told me that it was 39 miles away in Hyde Park Massachusetts.  I was pretty sure that wasn't correct.  Ultimately I found it and, YES, this IS the kind of grocery store I am used to.  I was able to complete my shopping here and made my way back to the apartment  where I made successfully made dinner.

We ate, contemplated television shows or a movie to watch.  Watched about 10 minutes of "To All the Boys I've Loved Before", decided it wasn't for us and both started to feel the lack of sleep catch up with us.  We tossed the states and here are the ones remaining in the running for next year. 

Tomorrow our plan is to visit the local zoo and then stay after dark for their Jack O Lantern Spectacular AND ride their Soaring Eagle Zip Line over the giant pumpkins.  I know!!   Sounds like a blast, right?

Did I mention that this is my favorite weekend of the year?