Well, it was a miserable night. We were too hot, and at one point James woke up railing against the heat. To add insult to injury, about three in the morning there came hellish pounding from the next room and then sounds like someone was racing plastic garbage bins up and down the hall. James woke up, then fell back to sleep, leaving me stewing. At 3:50 I put on some better clothes and stomped to the front desk to protest. Apparently someone had left and that was their luggage cart. What were they doing with it, Demolition Derby? And why doesn't this place have room darkening curtains anyway?

So we were hungry and exhausted when we got up for breakfast. Nice assortment, bagels, biscuits, toast, a pancake making machine, cereal, eggs and sausage, hard boiled eggs, two kinds of milk, oatmeal packets, juice. Nice roomy area to eat. But, damn, were we tired.

I called my cousin Debbie at breakfast, but got no answer. She and her husband have their own tool-making shop, so I expected they might be at work, even on Saturday. So we left a note on the room of the door about the air conditioner, and departed for points south. Our transportation, by the way, is a modified Dodge Caravan. I was driving it today and it basically drives like my PT, only...larger. I wish it had better suspension. The roads are a mess, especially after all that snow last winter. The streets in Rhode Island rattled our teeth sometimes.

Got to see the new I-195 interchange, which is on different levels and looks like a junior "Spaghetti Junction." Hopefully makes it easier to go eastbound than when I was taking it to work every day.

I had some foam visors with us for the sun, but they don't protect on top, so I headed down to Quonset Point. I thought James could get a baseball cap there at the air museum. But it has been closed since 2014; part of the roof collapsed in a snowstorm. The planes once in the hanger are along the shoreline, absorbing salt air. The museum committee has a building going up in a new location, but it won't be done for another two years. James was pretty unhappy. The last time we were here, the place had improved. What a letdown.

Instead we visited the tiny, new Seabee Museum just down the road. The Seabees actually began in Davisville, RI, during World War II, and of course the Quonset hut originated here as well. ("Quonset" is a Native American word meaning "barrier.") The museum is just in the beginning stages and has little things like uniforms, camp art, and other memorabilia from the second World War all the way up to the present.  Inside you also find out there were several different versions of Quonset huts, not just one kind. Early ones were just a semicircular topped building, later ones had side walls. Some had overhangs in front of the doors. There were examples of all kinds outside, plus a chapel, a couple of turfed bunkers that now have trees growing out of them, a pathway with memorial stones for different divisions of the Seabees as well as ones donated for individuals, and a big flagpole with the US, Navy, and POW flags flapping in the strong breeze. James' chair rolled around the paths easily. It was quite chilly, but we reveled in it after this summer.

By now it was lunchtime, so we headed back to Cranston and had lunch at T's on Park Avenue. I of course ordered some of the chicken soup I loved previously. I think they've changed the recipe. :-( Their old soup tasted a lot like my mom's, but this has different spices in it now. It was still good; I had it with a side of bacon and snitched French fries from James' mushroom burger.

It was still bright and blue and beautifully breezy. I wanted something special for dessert and wanted to go somewhere special at the same time. So after taking a turn around the old neighborhood and stopping by Debbie and Richard's workplace to see if they were there, I had one more thing left to do: I headed for the cemetery. I thought I could find my Mom and Dad's grave, and James swore I was going the correct way, but I never could find it. But I did walk around a bit and talk to them, and Mom would understand. She always did have trouble with maps...

I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone about dessert and "beautiful places," and headed down to Point Judith lighthouse. Well, both Aunt Carrie's (famous for their clam cakes chowder) and the Point Judith location of Iggy's had closed for the season. I thought that wasn't until the end of the month. And, alas, not only does the Department of Homeland Security now have the entire lighthouse and Coast Guard station fenced off, but James and I were both suffering from that old person's disease, Gottapee. [wry grin] We were able to park in the new observation area next to the lighthouse where a restaurant had stood for years, and I took some lovely photos of the sky, the surf, the sailboat and the power boat and the cabin cruiser, and even a short film, but eventually we had to head back. We stopped at a Dunkin Donuts both to offload and onload liquid, if you get my drift. On the other hand, it was fortuitous, since they had coffee milk.

Eventually we ended up where I should have headed in the first place, at Oakland Beach, to the original Iggy's, which is now a year-round restaurant. Soon we had six hot doughboys in our possession. I took the van the rest of the way down the beach, where we parked along the sea wall and rolled down the van windows and listened to the scree of the seagulls and the hish-hish of the surf and picked out the Jamestown and Newport bridges in the distance as we ate the crunchy outside, chewy inside, sugar-sprinkled golden fried dough.

One enterprising seagull noticed us park and sauntered up on the rocks of the seawall, giving me a gimlet eye. I had to laugh, because he was so plainly cadging for a handout it was funny. Even when a jogger made him desert his post and float in the water for a few minutes, he didn't give up. He finally flapped back on the wall and made eye contact with me again. "Lady, can you spare a poor hungry seagull a bite?" Poor hungry my foot! He was fat and sleek and healthy-looking, but yes, I threw him bits of doughboy anyway. The crows got half of it, but he did get to gobble a few bits.

Reluctantly we left our new avian friend and made our way back north to Norwood. The room was blessedly cool when we got in. We dropped off the camera and then drove down the road to Texas Roadhouse for supper. It was very crowded and extremely noisy as usual, but it wasn't too long a wait. Because of the doughboys, we skipped having any starch at all, even refusing the usual rolls. Instead we had a small steak and salads and a veggie each, and just drank water. Hopefully that will even out James' blood sugar.

Stopped at Walgreen's to get James another cane; we left his at home and he badly needs it. It won't go to waste, since we are getting older and will need such tools in the future, alas, and then it was back to the hotel room, with a nicely repaired air conditioner. Sat, relaxed, and watched Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Labels: television, travel

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:24:00 PM

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