With a large family of 12 it is not so easy for my wife and I to go away by ourselves. So when an opportunity arose to have someone available to take care of the kids so we can go away for a short trip we grabbed it! Unfortunately, we were only able to get 2 days and one night, earning a
mazel tov from
@davidrotts63 and a
LOL from
@Dan who could not even figure out why we would do more than going to a nearby hotel for the night. Looks like IY”H one day Dan will be coming to me for travel advice once he has a large family himself
Being that we only had a short amount of time, we were limited in how far we could go. Further complicating things, the weather forecast for the two available days was for thunderstorms covering much of the region. The type of place we were looking for was one where we could spend time outdoors and walk around in a nice relaxing nature oriented setting. After narrowing things down, we ended up choosing to go to Newport, RI.
Our first stop on the way in was at the John H. Chafee Nature Preserve for no reason other than that we were passing it anyhow. The park consists of a trail to the bay and along the water.
We walked straight, but in hindsight, you are probably best off taking the left turn and getting along the peninsula. It is a pretty basic walk to the shore. The shore itself is beautiful of course but we would skip that if we would be doing it over. One nice fringe benefit from having gone there was that along the way I noticed a bird (I think it is a gray catbird based on
Merlin) bringing food to its nest and took the opportunity to be makeyem shiluach haken.
It struck us how wherever you go the shore is full of seashells at the high water line.
From there we drove over to the hotel. We chose the Wyndham Onshore. It is a timeshare property operated by Wyndham of only suites with full kitchens. We ended up with a 2 bedroom suite. They are closing for renovations over the winter and can definitely use it. The rooms are clean and nice but outdated and tired.
The location, on the other hand is probably from the best of all hotels in Newport. It is on the water and the building we were in was is actually a part of the marina with a nice balcony overlooking the bay. Once they remodel it should be a great hotel.
By then it was getting close to mincha time so we just went walking aroung the harbor until mincha and then went to daven in Touro Synagogue. There are enough pictures around of touro which are much better than anything I took so I will leave those out. After mariv we went to buy some grilling supplies, grilled supper, ate, and called it a day.
To be continued….
