Into Massachusetts...

We slept in fairly late today. Not surprising, considering how tired we both were last night. After a good night's sleep, we got ourselves ready, got everything put in the car, and then headed across the road to the Dunkin' Donuts there. The girlfriend got a little flatbread sandwich they had there, and I got my usual cinnamon roll thing. Unfortunately, it looks like the flatbread sandwich may have had a bit of spinach in it. The girlfriend is allergic to spinach, and it tends to make her feel rather ill, but she was so hungry that she went ahead and ate most of it anyway. So far she's not showing any ill effects, so maybe it wasn't spinach after all...

The drive to get out of Rhode Island didn't take very long. We didn't really expect it to, considering that the state is only about a hundred miles in any direction. There were a lot of gorgeous old houses along the freeway, most of which probably weren't along any kind of highway when they were built. I did my best to get pictures:







There was also this nice old church, as there seem to be hundreds of all over the parts of the East we've been through:



And, after an hour of driving or so, it was into Massachusetts:



We've stopped at the little welcome center on the freeway and picked up some literature and some suggestions from the nice lady who works here, and it's about time to head back on the road again. Last leg before we get to rest from driving for a while...

A lovely town and meeting new old friends...

We had a great time in Providence. We got directions to the Trinity Brewhouse from Xian, and it turned out to be quite easy to find, right off the freeway. We had a bit of a problem finding a parking place, but eventually we did. And it seems that they turn off the parking meters, so we didn't even have to feed the meter.

A short walk brought us to the Trinity, which is a nice little pub and restaurant. We were warmly greeted by our hosts upon walking through the door. Xian and Mike were very nice and a lot of fun to hang out with. I've "known" Xian on Stumbleupon for a couple of years now, but this was the first time to actually meet her in person. She's as nice as I expected, and someday or another, we need to get back up here and actually be able to spend a little more time, not just an hour or so at dinner.

As it is, we spent a while enjoying dinner and trading stories of their mad drive across the country from Washington and our drive so far from Texas, along with whatever happened to come up in discussion. The tiny size of some of the states here in the northeast came up. It's funny that people here often won't drive to someplace 10 miles away because it just seems to far. Of course, considering that we're in a state that's pretty much a square 100 miles tall and 100 miles wide, I guess that's not too odd a mindset.

Unfortunately, I forgot to get pictures again. Xian did indeed have the glitter on her eyes that she often displays on her blog pictures. The girlfriend and I were also both expecting her voice to be a bit more high-pitched than it was. Oh, she displayed her "little girl" voice here and there, but in general, she's got a very nice voice that really isn't much higher than I would expect from seeing her. That's a good thing...

The meal itself was pretty good. We all pretty much had pub grub, but the burgers and fries were very tasty and well-prepared. And apparently the beer was pretty good, too. They brew it themselves, but I didn't indulge, because the hops tends to do very bad things to my body. My sweetie had a dark Russian ale, and she said it was quite good. I just had a couple of rum and cokes.

After we finished our dinner and drinks, and had chatted for a while, we had to call it an evening. My girlfriend and I were still pretty tired from all the walking and driving we'd been doing for the past few days, and I think if we'd stayed out too much longer, we would have had to take a nap in the car before getting back here to the motel. As it is, it took us a little longer than expected to get back here.

We walked back to the car, and I snapped a couple of pictures of some of the nearby buildings, which were lit up pretty nicely:






We'd like to get back sometime in the future and be able to explore the city a little more in the daytime, but we didn't really have the chance this time around, and we didn't really want to drive around the city at night, when most of the interesting places were probably closed anyway.

So we headed back toward the motel. Or so we thought. We kind of got trapped in the wrong lane by a little bit of traffic and wound up hitting a different highway than the one we came up on. Of course, since it seemed like it would be so easy to find the Trinity and get back, I hadn't bothered to bring the laptop or GPS. So we wound up driving a few miles in the wrong direction. I really need to learn to trust the girlfriend's holistic driving techniques, because she would have had us back on the path a lot quicker than I did. I would have had us back in Connecticut before too terribly long. But we wound up backtracking after driving through a couple of little residential districts. At least we didn't end up in the industrial part of town...

After getting on the right freeway, it wasn't too tough to get back to the motel. And here we are, watching a bit of history on the tube and getting ready to call it a night. Overall, it was a really nice visit here to Providence, but tomorrow, it's on to the real goal of the trip...

Connecticut and Rhode Island

Only about an hour after hitting New York City, we were welcomed to Connecticut:


The drive through Connecticut began well enough, and we were granted a number of little views of the ocean and its offshoots. I took quite a number of pictures, since I happen to like water views, but a lot of them look fairly similar, and a lot of them were ruined by the highway rails in the way. Here's a sampling, though:



And this one with the little lighthouse in the haze:


We also saw a variety of other odd things, like this building:


Unfortunately, one of the other things we saw a lot in Connecticut, which we hadn't seen much anywhere else, was traffic. There were two major places, around Bridgeport and New Haven, where we were slowed down to 15 to 20 MPH for a mile or so. In general, we hadn't seen much traffic at all before then, and we never really did see much explanation for the slowdowns here, like an accident or anything. And it wasn't rush hour. Oh well. In any case, that was about the only thing that went all that bad in Connecticut. It took us just about two hours to get through the state.

We did have an odd problem with my GPS unit. It stopped updating the trail just about ten minutes or so into Connecticut. Apparently, it was keeping track of them and recording all the data, but I couldn't get it to update to the screen, by refreshing it or anything. So we pulled over and I rebooted the computer, but that's just a minor inconvenience.

Around 4:15 local time, we came across this little sign:


Followed shortly by the more ornate version:


Now we're stopped at the Motel 6 in Warwick, Rhode Island. Unfortunately, they don't have a fridge or anything, and it appears that our Thai food, which we left in the car last night, have gone bad. It's too bad, because the food was actually pretty good. Oh well. The room is all right, pretty basic, as Motel 6 rooms are wont to be. It's clean, though, and the amenities they do have seem to work fine.

Right now we're taking advantage of the comfortable bed to put our feet up a little, trying to get them back in good working order, because we're going to go meet Xian and Mike in Providence this evening. And we don't want to be staggering around like a couple of cripples, now do we?...