Newport not-so-fast, and bachelorettes galore

Saturday was one of those hot, steamy nights that make you just want to be out on the water on a motorboat or sailboat. Not actually owning such a boat meant that RG and I had just about one good option for the evening: taking the fast ferry from Providence to Newport. We decided on this plan at around 4:30, and in a few minutes I had booked us online on the 6:05 boat with a return at 9:50 p.m. -- enough time for dinner and walking around, or so I thought. Cost: $48.

The main attraction was the boat ride, because when it comes to this ferry, "fast" is really not that fast, at least not for us. It would take us, say, 20 minutes to drive to the ferry dock at Conley Piers off Allens Avenue in Providence, another 10 to park and pick up our tickets, then 50 for the actual trip to Newport. By way of comparison, driving straight to Newport from where we live in Barrington might take us 40 minutes. Of course, then we'd have to park the car.

When we arrived at the Pier and saw big "LOT FULL" signs, we thought we were sunk. But it turned out that some kind of big noisy carnival and concert was being held, and when we said we were there for the ferry, we were directed to a far back parking area and told to "just squeeze in wherever you can." After picking up our tickets, we strolled over to the Tiki Bar waiting area, and right on time, here comes the Ocean State catamaran ferry. It was so hot, we sat in the open-air area on top all the way down and had fun identifying familiar Bay landmarks from the water side. There was Crescent Park, there was Blithewold mansion, there was Melville Boat Basin and finally the War College.

We stepped onto the Newport dock just after 7, windblown but definitely cooled off. Had we driven, leaving the house at 5, we'd have arrived an hour ago, paying maybe $8 for two gallons of gas and another $10 to $15 to park. But where would be the adventure in that?

Newport was really, really jumping. There was no sign of any slack-off in tourism or economic slowdown in the city that night. Walking up and down the waterfront nearly to Wellington Avenue, we were turned away from restaurant after restaurant. At all of my favorite places to eat on the harbor -- 22 Bowen's, Clarke Cooke, the Pearl and the West Deck, we were firmly told that without reservations, the wait would be an hour to an hour and a half. My last best hope, Cafe Zelda, I thought might be sufficiently off the tourist radar to at least sit us at the bar. No such luck.

So, sad to say, somewhere around 9 p.m., we staggered into a convenience store and seized on Milky Way frozen ice cream bars and bottled iced tea. Sitting on a curbstone, watching the parade of people passing by, we couldn't help but notice an inordinate number of bachelorette types, traveling in groups of 6 or 7, teetering precariously on high heels and giggling as they floated on cascades of chiffon ruffles, leaving clouds of perfume in their wakes. One girl even had a sash across her bosom that said "Bachelorette."

These women were so numerous, in fact, that even some of the young men they passed seemed to have had enough. "Oh no! Not more bachelorettes!" we overheard one man say as he stepped into Thames Street to dodge yet another pastel pod.

So intrigued by this phenomenon was I that, once back home and having revived myself somewhat with a peanut butter sandwich, I Googled "bachelorettes newport ri". What I found (from a blog called Be My Bridesmaid) is that Newport has become the unofficial bachelorette capital of the East Coast, possibly the country.

Who knew? I just hope that wherever they all were headed on those impossibly high heels, they had reservations for dinner.

Out Of Office Reply Day

Today was Day 3 or 4 of a string of perfect days to be on vacation in Rhode Island. The inland temperature topped 90, but at the coast it was in the 80s with a cooling breeze. If you were at work today, you must have been lonely, because everyone else was off.

Every email I sent got the brisk bounceback message "Out Of Office Reply," and every office phone that answered was a voice mail message to the effect that "I will be out of the office until Monday, July 21."

It wasn't a day to do any kind of business, and most people were smart enough to know it.

Here's what some of them were doing while you were working!

Kayaking on Ninigret Pond in Charlestown.


Eating fried clams at Champlin's in Galilee.

Jumping from a rope swing into the Pawcatuck River in Westerly.

After 6, even the lifeguards were off, above at East Beach in Charlestown.

Catching some rays at Green Hill Beach

Sunday didn't seem like much of a beach day -- windy with a low ceiling of clouds over Providence. But my friend Charlie only gets Sundays off, so it was going to be a beach day for us. We'd made plans earlier in the week to catch up, and when he came (with his friend Alan) to pick me up, I noted that his perpetual tan had faded like a favorite T shirt. Time to catch some rays.

Leaving Retired Guy to monitor the Tour de France and the Red Sox on TV, the three of us had just started for Middletown when Maria called and said she'd rented a place in Green Hill for August and did we want to go down to the shore with her while she paid the deposit? We'd be able to park the car at her place to use the beach, which has no public parking. We made a U turn to pick her up, and then the four of us were heading to South Kingstown on Route 2, the old South County Trail, still the best route to the shore.

Well, it turned out to be a great beach day. Seemingly, the wind had pushed the clouds inland, leaving the coastline clear as a bell, with a nice breeze to cool us off while we sat on an old flannel sheet of Alan's and ate the sandwiches we'd bought at Rippy's. Charlie had brought along some SPF 4 sun lotion, and even though I had my 45 in my bag, I couldn't resist. The stuff is practically a controlled substance now. I felt I had to look around to see if anyone could see me putting it on.

The waves at Green Hill Beach were big, the backwash tugging you out and burying your feet in the sand whle you picked your moment to jump in. But the water was perfect. (I had brought my instant-read meat thermometer, and it read a comfortable 70.)

It was the first time I'd met Alan, who grew up in North Providence but escaped to the Charlestown/Matunuck shore at every opportunity. He knew his way around, remembered the long-gone Green Hill Motel, where you used to be able to park and pay to use the beach, and the glory days of Moonstone Beach, now lost to the dreaded piping plovers.

We all noted the plethora of Private Beach signs, keeping different groups of people -- and hypothetical birds -- each on their own patch of sand, which unfortunately was steadily shrinking as the tide came up late in the afternoon. "You know, the sand below the mean high tide line is public," I said to Alan, kind of as a test. But the guy knew his stuff: "Yeah, but just try sitting over there, and watch what happens."

Besides being savvy about Rhode Island state law and beach rights, Alan demonstrated a neat beach trick I'd never seen before: burning wood with a magnifying glass. He'd brought along a powerful jewelers' glass, through which he focused the sun's rays on pieces of weathered beach wood to burn letters and pictures into them with a tiny, moving flame.

We all were mesmerized by the process, and before long he'd made a beachy sign for Maria's Providence store, Antiques and Interiors, and one each for me and Charlie to take home.



He said he'd known by looking at the clouds over Providence that morning that the coastline would be clear. I guess it takes an old beach bum from North Providence to know that kind of thing.

Micro cars at Larz Anderson Museum

Owning a Mini Cooper seems to have unleashed a craving in us to see even smaller cars -- cars such as these otherworldly-looking micro classics, which were gathered today for a show on the grounds of the Larz Anderson Car Museum in Brookline, Mass.

We recruited nephew Will, 9, who is a junior car head himself, to spend the afternoon looking at dozens of cars that are so small that they make our Mini CHEEKY look like an SUV. I rode in one car -- a miniscule yellow Fiat checker taxi -- whose proud owner told me it gets 80 miles per gallon of gas. (I didn't tell him that I've heard it said about Fiats that the letters in the name stand for "Fix it again, Tony.")

While Micro Mini Day happens just once a year, the Anderson historic car barn museum is less than an hour's drive from Providence, and it hosts unusual car events on Saturdays through October. Next Saturday is Extinct Auto Day, for example, followed by Triumph and Miata Days. The last event this year is Studebaker Day Oct. 26.

Summer night: Cruising in South County

I'm almost afraid to say it, but so far, this has been a summer of spectacular weather.

Yesterday afternoon, having done a few mundane errands in Warwick, RG and I decided to cruise on down to the shore in Charlestown and Westerly to catch a little of that summer-vacation feeling. We did have a couple of goals in mind, including rounding out our continuing exploration of the state's best ice cream places and fried clam shacks. (Look for the results soon on Projo.)

South County is prime territory for clams and ice cream, and a Mini Cooper is the ideal mode of transportation for the winding back roads that took us through the pretty villages of Hopkinton, Hope Valley and Wyoming all the way down to Route 1. (To whom do we complain about the new traffic lights at so many intersections that interrupt what used to be a beautiful flow along Rhode Island's premier shoreline highway?)

After a while, we landed in Watch Hill.

Having spent my favorite childhood summers in nearby Weekapaug, to me this part of the Westerly shore is summer on a plate.

A few things had changed since I'd last been in town, including the reopening of the beloved Book & Tackle used-book shop near its old spot but in a new building on Bay Street, and the raising of a skeleton of a new Ocean House Hotel up on Bluff Road. The price to ride the beach-side carousel had gone up (are the horses fueling up with gas?), and the walkers' entrance to Napatree Point had been refurbished (see photo, below, of the new entrance).

For more on exploring Watch Hill, look for an upcoming feature in Projo. In the meantime, check out the slideshow of my harbor photos from last night that follows this post.


We headed over to Misquamicut to try to catch some of Duke Robillard's free concert at the beach (see yesterday's post for more about that), but by the time we got there the parking lots were full and the sand in front of the stage was entirely covered with people in beach chairs. It was standing-room-only, with your feet in the ocean and the great band's sounds muffled by the roar of the surf.

So we headed home, sated with clams and ice cream -- a full plate of memorable South County summer specials to share.

In season: Free outdoor concerts

So Retired Guy and I headed down to Middletown last evening to check out the sounds of "The Elderly Brothers," who were performing an outdoor free concert at Sweet Berry Farm on Mitchell's Lane. Sweet Berry (already one of my favorite farmstands in the state) is playing host to a series of free Tuesday evening concerts (6 to 8 p.m.) this summer, and last night's "'50s Picnic" theme was the very first one.

Plenty of other people found it impossible to resist the siren call of free music and picnicking on the lawn. While it wasn't quite Tanglewood, there was an appreciative crowd of perhaps 75 people listening to mellow renditions of oldies such as Only the Lonely, Johnny B. Goode, and several James Taylor numbers.

Many brought their own picnics, including chilled bottles of wine and fancy baskets, and set themselves up with lawn chairs and folding tables with tablecloths. Others bought food in the Sweet Berry cafe or purchased the $9.99 menu special of Southern fried chicken, red potato salad, succotash and Jell-O in a cup.

We shared the chicken plate, and it was excellent -- the chicken crispy, the succotash farmstand-fresh and delicious. The music was relaxing, and for the livelier numbers some of the children in the audience caught the spirit and got up to dance.

Then the wind came up and the sky darkened ominously, so we packed up and left early.

Tonight, Rhode Island's own Duke Robillard and his blues band play a free concert at 6 p.m. at Westerly Town Beach (next to Misquamicut State Beach). The venue couldn't be nicer for the Blues On The Beach series: You can swim in the ocean, then picnic on the sand right in front of the band. Here are photos from a 2006 Blues On The Beach concert.

March of the strawberries: '08s are history

"Sad but true," says the sign at Sweet Berry Farm in Middletown. "Strawberries are over."

They mean local strawberries, of course. Strawberries are marching up the continent, and they've just moved north of us now. At least for a few more weeks, you'll still be able to find boxes of berries picked in Massachusetts and New Hampshire at farmstands like Walker's in Little Compton and Schartner Farms in Exeter (Schartner even has a satellite farm on West Side Road in North Conway, NH, so they'll be getting their farmstand berries from there for a while longer.)

For now, local pick-your-own places are featuring raspberries. In a couple more weeks, there'll be blueberries. Those are the big three for local berries; after that, it's all about corn and pumpkins.

In addition to picking raspberries, you might want to head to beautiful Sweet Berry Farm on Tuesday evenings (beginning tonight) for their summer series of free outdoor concerts. Tonight's is a '50s picnic with "The Elderly Brothers." You can bring a blanket to sit on and your own picnic, or purchase food from the farmstand, where the menu is paired with the music and includes nostalgic items such as mini-marshmallow Jell-O, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese.

Kayaking on Brickyard Pond

Last week, RG and I explored Barrington's Brickyard Pond in the 9.5-foot kayaks we bought in April.

The pond, which is next to the East Bay Bike Path, is accessed through Veteran's Park behind the YMCA on Maple Avenue. For this first kayak adventure, RG and I recruited pals from North Attleboro, Gail and Stan, who have already bought one kayak and ordered a second. (This simple type of kayak, which you steer by paddling like a canoe, because it doesn't have a rudder, costs around $400.) We saw some turtles, these stately swans paddling with their new chicks, and a pair of ospreys, one carrying a fish in its beak.

Stocked with trout, Brickyard is mostly surrounded by trees, so you can feel as if you're in a far more remote location than the East Bay. Next time out, RG plans to bring his fishing rod and give those ospreys some competition.

To find out more about kayaking in Rhode Island, visit the Rhode Island Blueways website for launch spots and events.

Pick your own (damn) strawberries

It's probably only me who reads the emphasis as, "Pick your own strawberries," as in, "Hands off of mine!"

Last week, my friend Deb and I picked these berries (20 pounds total!) in about an hour at Middletown's Sweet Berry Farm, the place which every year seems to me to have the sweetest, reddest, best-tasting berries around. (Other great places I can personally vouch for are Four Town Farm in Seekonk and Schartner Farms in Exeter.) While the going rate for they-picked berries at most farmstands seemed to be around $5.50 this season, these "picked-them-ourselves" berries were $1.79 a pound, as long as you picked at least ten pounds, which Deb and I made sure we did.

With my berries, I made three pies -- two of my family's ancestral recipe for a glazed pie, and one double-crusted strawberry-rhubarb (a favorite of my Retired Guy, who finds the ancestral recipe too sweet). I still had plenty more berries, and they weren't going to keep because they were so ripe and so full of water, so I didn't even wait till the next day to freeze the rest in containers (after slicing the berries and dusting them with sugar).

The ancestral pie recipe was allegedly discovered by my grandmother Zeller back in the '50s in a Ladies' Home Journal type of magazine, which printed it as a favorite of First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. Having terrible sweet-tooths, we all loved it, and the pie has been enshrined in family recipe boxes ever since. Unfortunately, as those boxes predate the internet, I'll have to type here the recipe as given by Mamie herself. Don't wait to make it, though. "Pick your own" berries are going by fast.

MAMIE EISENHOWER'S STRAWBERRY PIE

1 baked pie shell (supermarket brand is fine here)
1 generous quart strawberries
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 to 4 ounces softened cream cheese
1 cup cream, whipped and sweetened as desired

When the pie shell is cool, spread the cream cheese in the bottom, being careful not to break the crust. If you do, just cover over the break with some cream cheese. Put half (one pint) of the berries into a blender or food processor and puree them. In a saucepan on the stove, bring the puree to boiling, then add the sugar and cornstarch, which have been mixed together for ease of blending. Cook this mixture slowly, stirring continuously, for about ten minutes or until it loses the cloudiness from the cornstarch. Then place the hot saucepan in a sink of cold water to chill it. Meanwhile, place the other pint of whole, perfect berries on top of the cream cheese in the pie crust. Pour the cooled strawberry mixture over the top of the whole berries and spread it around to cover them completely. Refrigerate the pie, just to set it, and before serving, top with the sweetened whipped cream.

Mini Nation: Fun and games in NH

Ever since we ordered our Mini (vanity plate CHEEKY) back in April, Retired Guy and I knew we'd go to the Minis On Top rally run up Mount Washington. Who could resist the idea of hundreds of gaily accessorized Mini Coopers caravaning up the highest mountain in the northeast? At 6,288 feet, the mountain's height matched the date of this year's (the sixth annual) Minis On Top: 6-28-08.

And we did have fun. Along with 215 other goofy Mini owners, we gawked at all the other interesting color combinations and car graphics, beginning with those in the caravan of Minis that started for the North Country from Area 51 off Route 93 just north of Concord. The Minis followed three different routes to get to Gorham, the town just north of Mount Washington where we spent the night. The next morning, everyone drove down to the Loon ski area parking lot in Lincoln for a meet that featured contests in various categories such as Best Sound System, Dirtiest, Cleanest, and Best Overall Car.

RG was hopeful he'd get a nod from the judges for his roof decal of the Rhode Island state flag, but he lost out to a very flashy number: a gull-wing door modification of a Mini that captured everyone's attention and took two separate Best awards.

But the most fun of all was watching the entries in a Mini Driving Skills (O)lympics. (The organizers weren't allowed to officially call it Olympics, because of copyright issues.) Dozens of hopeful Mini drivers waited in line to take their cars through an obstacle course of orange traffic cones, starting off by picking up an apple from the ground and then driving a short distance to balance it carefully on top of a traffic cone.

The course was much harder than it looked, and it was fun to watch the most macho entrants rev their engines only to stall out repeatedly. One guy in particular (a fellow Rhode Islander) came in dead last while more precise drivers — especially a woman from New York City — maneuvered far more delicately to place close to the top of the order.

"Next year," said Retired Guy. "I need to practice."

After all that excitement, the actual climb to the top of Mount Washington (in heavy fog) came as almost an afterthought. The best part of the Mini vacation weekend was meeting new friends Jeff, Monica and Catherine, with whom we've already planned to enter as a team in the Mini Trivia Contest next year.

Mini vacation: 215 Mini Coopers climb Mount Washington in the MOT (Minis On Top) rally