non-work

... spending the night at Rutland VT

No reason to get up and going early so we do not.

My breakfast is the carrot cake from a couple of nights ago, and a yogurt.

We do pull out at 8:30 AM.

1st stop is '40 steps,' we are early so we find a place to park, half the spots are still empty.

Once we walk the steps, we are trying to take a selfie when someone offers to get a picture for us ... we just kind of helpless that way :)

Then we walked the Cliff Trail to the north. The trail to the south is barricaded off. You need to take a 1/3 mile detour to get back to the trail. Before we leave, I am waiting for BB to use the outhouse and I here people arriving and wanting to take the south trail. They make it sound like it is the good one. Maybe next time.

When we left we decided to drive past where the detour goes and then we drove past all the hold mansions. Lots of estates along the water front. One not along the water front is for sale, for $8+ million.

It looks like there are a few of the mansions that are open for tours. One is the Vanderbilt Mansion.

Once we got past the mansions we got onto Ocean Ave and followed that along the coast. At one point we parked and sat on the rocks for a few minutes. There was another place there was a sandy beach but parking there was $30 so we passed.

We did get a few pictures and there was a few that we did not get.

There are also two state parks in Newport, one is Fort Adams, built in the first half of the 1800's.

By now we are hungry so BB finds us a place to eat.

3rd stop was Mel's Cafenio because they have cheesesteaks. They are supposed to be open until 1 PM but were closed before that. So we ended up a 'Pour Judgement,' a bar with street seating. I had some kind of bacon and pasta, very good but so much that I couldn't even eat all of the bacon. We had our food and were done eating within the hour but couldn't wait for the waitress to bring us our bill, we went inside to pay at the counter. We had only paid the meter for our car for one hour because we were going to get our cheesesteaks to go ...

We have spent a lot of time the last two days driving at a few miles an hour on narrow, one way streets and BB needs to get to the open road. Sort of. We have four hours to go to get to tonight's hotel and almost all of that is on non-freeway. At one point we do add a few more miles to get on the freeway. It ended up being three hours between stops.

4th stop is the VT welcome center near Guilford. Someone was selling home cooked food of all kinds for a benefit for someone so we got some cookies, water and a couple of other things. They also had meals but we were still full.

Other family arrived in CT via airplane this PM and BB has been 'stalking them' all day. When we leave the rest area we are 15 minutes behind them and that is about where we stay ... unless the computer looses track of them and we pass them ... but then the computer catches up and they are ahead of us again.

5th and final stop is the Comfort Inn in Rutland. The same one we stayed at with our RV's a few months ago. Once we check in, we pick up other family and head downtown to Hop'n Moose. We were not real hungry so we split one pizza. Rutland Raider ... two kinds of cheese, apples, bacon and maple syrup. It was good, if we had been more hungry we might have ordered a 2nd one.

Kind of quiet here for a Saturday night. We are there at 8 PM and they are cleaning up around us. When we left we were the only ones sitting on the street, one other couple was sitting on their deck, not sure how many inside.

Load board

US - 336

IA - 162/159