Newport Rhode Island

I am back from my mini-vacation to Newport Rhode Island. Wes and I had a great time and the weather turned out to be absolutely beautiful. However, if you know anything about East Coast stuff, you're probably saying to yourself, "hey, that's the USS Constitution and it's in Boston." Yes, you are correct. Since my husband in is the Navy and we were only an hour away from Boston, we went to visit the oldest commissioned naval ship in the US (and the oldest one in the world that still floats). My husband is also working on a model of this ship, so we took about 50 pictures. Since I had never been in Boston, it was cool just to be there.

Since we were in Boston anyway, and just a few steps from the Bunker Hill memorial, we decided to go visit. I must say that Boston is a beautiful city and even though we didn't go far, I thought it was a great area. The memorial had been closed for repairs, but "lucky" for us, is had just opened the day before. I say "lucky" because we decided to go to the top. 294 steps up, a quick (less than 3 minutes) look around and 294 steps back down. We were hurting by the time we got back down. But it was worth it. The view of the city was amazing.

Newport is known for it's summer homes, of which we visited five. Newport itself was quite charming and even though the trees were still bare, I completely understand why people would want to summer there. The above house is called The Marble House and was built for one of the Vanderbilt families. The houses were elaborate, beautiful and ostentatious. The Breakers, another Vanderbilt home, was 138,000 square feet and took a whole acre of land. The Marble House was the fourth house we visited. However, our jaws still dropped when we walked in. This was the most amazing, most beautiful, most spectacular house I've ever seen (of a private citizen: I've seen palaces in Russia). The trip to Newport was worth it just to see this house (but if you're there anyway, see The Breakers and The Elms too).

The trip to Newport was wonderful. I got to spend time with my husband (it was so good to see him again), visit (drive through) 6 states I'd never been too (Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts), and see new stuff. I also got to eat a lot of really good seafood. The drive there was 13 hours, thanks to a few mistakes of mapquest and my husband (we also hit the New York area at 5:00pm on a weekday). The trip back only took me 11 hours. My riding companion was another officer's wife, but she doesn't have a driver's license. The only thing I will say about her is that her favorite channel is the Disney channel, her favorite books are kids' books, and she's excited because her family got her a leap frog game for Christmas so she can work on her math. She also spent ages 3 through 18 in foster homes. At least I had company.

Unfortunately my husband has to stay in Rhode Island for three weeks. But, I did have substitute teacher training yesterday and I hope to start subbing next week. I have been really tired but I don't know if that's from the Zoloft or because so much is going on that I'm really tired. I guess we'll find out. Things are going well and I'm happy.