Sights

I shot this image for Craig's parents (and turned it sepia internally in the camera - oh, the features of technology these days...) of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan and am actually very pleased with the result. It's funny that being in New York can turn any average Joe Photographer (me) into a smashing successful artist in a split second, just by virtue of New York being New York...anyway, I wanted to return to post about our Newport experience before it's too far past. Last Sunday morning, Craig's mom and dad went to church (not to St. Patrick's but to our nearby Catholic mass at 91st) and Craig and I packed for our trip. I took the opportunity of their absence to deflate the air mattress we'd been using while they slept in our bed, return the bookshelf from the hallway to the second "bedroom" of our adorable tiny apartment, because before my parents arrived in April, we had re-engineered the entire layout of this place, moving a bookshelf to just outside the bathroom to make room for the stupidly large (Queen-sized) air mattress that we slept on prior to the move into our place, back at the sublet at 94th and 3rd (I just confused everything; picture it: the air mattress wouldn't fit in the second "bedroom" unless we dragged the bookshelf out to the hallway across from the bathroom and subsequently moved the dresser from one wall to another, in the second "bedroom"...nevermind all of this, just understand inviting one or more guests to stay at a two "bedroom" apartment in Manhattan might yield some rearrangement of large furniture items...!) and basically, back to while they were at church, I pieced our apartment back to the way it was always meant to be pre-guests, so that when Craig and I arrived back from Newport, it was only a matter of dropping bags on the kitchen floor and hitting the couch for recovery! All of that confusingly said, we took Craig's mom to Yura (now called "Corner Bakery & Cafe") for Mother's Day brunch before loading the BMW (Craig's parents' newly leased post-retirement cruiser) with bags and bags and bags of our stuff. Then we left Manhattan, headed north and traveled the 3+ hours to Newport, Rhode Island. I must say, despite the fact that car rides aren't particularly my favorite, we did have a relaxing and enjoyable drive. The tunes might not have suited me well (ie. I've had my fill of light rock or love ballads sung by Sade, Lionel Richie, Peter Cetera, Wham! and Gloria Estefan for just about the rest of my life) but we talked nearly the entire time, so there wasn't an abundance of chances for me to sing along in my head (since I knew all lyrics of every song from a former life where I was a light rock romantic) with all of the aforementioned artists as they crooned their hearts out about stuff no one sings about anymore unless commissioned to do so on American Idol. So, we arrived in Newport in one piece. Craig sat in the front seat with his dad Eddie, who is basically the older version of Craig in voice, personality, tendencies, stubborness and whatever else they completely have in common, and I sat in the back with Joann, who rolled her eyes as many times as me if not more at the hijinks of the two in the front.*Now, to skip to the Newport part, since I keep filling in miscellaneous details which I'm actually filling in to help me remember later at parts of our lives where we miss our families, the first sensory information that greeted me was that of the scent of stinky fish guts. Craig and I went to Newport a million years ago, but only for one day and it was such a quick tour of the town that we didn't have time to even breathe it in...well this time, yes, we breathed it all in. But, for Newport virgins, all of Newport does not reek of fish innards. It was just the backside of the hotel where we were staying, the lower class of fishermen and their lower class (yet still expensive) fishing boats with fish guts strewn about. Anyway, we checked in, gladly sprawled our stuff over the two floors' worth of space we had (kitchen, living room and two baths included) and then headed out for a walk. Without really gushing, I must say that Newport, Rhode Island is far and away one of the cutest towns I've ever, ever been in. Cute, quaint, modest yet so East Coast, seaside...I fell in absolute love with the place. So did Craig. And we spent a good portion of our day and a half there just gawking at the cool stuff. We ate amazing food, Craig and I snuck out a couple of times to play (a night on the town plus an afternoon sipping Blue Moons on the upper deck of a local bar) and we saw a Vanderbilt Mansion (the Breakers) and went to a Newport winery (as I already mentioned). Really, it was a very nice time. By Tuesday afternoon when Eddie and Joann dropped us off at the Newport Amtrak station, I felt very sad to leave them!*Then we rode the Amtrak from Newport back to Penn Station in New York. This ride, I must confess, distracted me very much from finishing my book club's American Pastoral. The coastline was peppered with sailboat masts and sun reflected on the water...it made reading seem sort of trivial while we traveled along the Atlantic. But in any event, we had such a nice time - the whole thing, really. And now we've got a Holiday weekend coming soon and I'm so looking forward to Central Park with Craig. Craig, me, sun, Central Park and sleep. Maybe I will shop one day. Djay and Diana are coming to town to see Di's sister so we will see them, too. But oh, the delight of a 3-day weekend...*