Travel and Work and Travel

I've been travelling a little this month, and meant to write about my two separate trips separately, but I got back from one, went back to work the next day, and then left for the other two days later. I spent the two days between a conference trip to Providence, Rhode Island (which I have only ever visited for another conference four years ago) and a personal trip to Greenville, South Carolina (which I've never visited before this trip) catching up on the work I missed in Rhode Island, and was too tired to write in between.

I went to Rhode Island with four coworkers, but other than my friend Meghan and I meeting up for some things the five of us mostly stayed with our own friends and colleagues, and didn't overlap much. On our first morning there, Meghan and I went to the same restaurant for breakfast that we ate at our first morning there last time, Brickway on Wickenden. While there, I spotted an intriguing sign:



"The grilled muffin...," I began, asking our server for clarification. "What is that?"

"They take a muffin, slice it in half, butter the halves, and throw it on the grill."

"I would like the blueberry."



I've never heard of a grilled muffin before that moment, but it was amazing. Crunchy on the outside, and butter-soaked and almost soggy on the inside.

After breakfast, Meghan got coffee while I marveled at their cold brew set up:



which, according to the man at the coffee place, takes 24 hours to brew a single pot. We also went to the Providence Pride Festival:





where the Providence Pride Festival stole ten dollars from me. When we were walking up to the entrance, all of the signs said it was either a dollar (for regular admission) or five dollars (for alcohol area admission and discounts from some vendors) to get in. Meghan wasn't carrying cash, so I offered to pay hers. I only had a twenty, so I offered it to the lady at the gate and told her it was for both of us.

"Admission for two? That's ten dollars each."

None of the signs said ten dollars each for any form of admission, and when we got to the other end of the festival they were charging either one or five dollars. I hope my (stolen) money is going to a good cause.

It was interesting to walk through a Pride Festival in a city, and state, that actually embraces and celebrates their LGBTQ+ community. There were banners on the lightpoles, signs everywhere, unvandalized posters, and they even lit the state capitol building in rainbow lights at night:



Compared to Tennessee, it could almost make one think about moving until one remembers that the northeast is an icy horrorscape of wintry snow for several months a year.

After breakfast, shopping, and Pride festing, we met up with my friend Stacy, and Meghan took us on a walking tour of Brown University, which is very fancy:



and has a bear:





The next morning, the conference had a 5K, which was not timed but was still fun and in which I did not come in last:







That night I had an excellent dinner with my friend Sonja, who I haven't seen since college, and the next night I convinced a group of people to go have dinner at Umelt, a restaurant that specializes in grilled cheese:



and dankness:



I had the special Pride grilled cheese, which was a regular grilled cheese with a lot of food coloring:



During the extra long lunch hour one of the other days Meghan and I walked to the Rhode Island School of Design bookstore, because I wanted a t-shirt for their very interestingly named sports teams:





and then when the conference was over and we had a whole morning before flying out I went and did some sightseeing:













and then we flew home, I went to work for two days, and then got up last Saturday morning and drove to Greenville, South Carolina, to see a play and visit my friends Mike and Sandy. Sandy and I see each other every few years, but this is the first time that Mike and I have seen each other in person since 2006:



That's us last weekend, not us in 2006, outside of Mike's theatre.

Since I was only in town for an overnight, I didn't see much beyond downtown, a few walking paths, and the park by our hotel, but Greenville seemed very pretty:















and the walking paths were wonderful, early in the morning before it got really hot and humid:













We also went out for drinks after the play, and my screwdriver came with a slice of orange so wide and with such a thick rind that we all kind of stared at it and tried to figure out if it was really an orange or some other, larger citrus fruit:



I thought it might be a blood orange, but that makes no sense in a drink made with regular orange juice, and it didn't occur to any of us to taste it, because it seemed vaguely frightening.

Except for the terrible construction traffic outside of Asheville, it was a wonderful weekend, and I'm supposed to go back in December to see another play, at Mike's theatre.

I might take a day off from work and actually spend more than a night there.

Providence, Rhode Island

Before I describe my trip to Providence this week, I'd like to share a brief lesson I learned about air travel on Thursday, when I was returning home:

You should not read books about pandemics on airplanes, because you will have an extremely uncomfortable trip if the person directly across the aisle from your aisle seat vomits loudly into their air-sickness bag.

Just FYI.

I was flying home on Thursday after flying out on Sunday for a really good conference with a few coworkers. The conference days were pretty busy, and I co-hosted a newcomer's reception and co-presented a session about NCAA regulations and housing for student athletes. Both went well, and I have a bunch of notes about topics like gender-inclusive housing and new laws about therapy animals that I will probably use, or at least share, at work someday, so I'm going to go ahead and call it a successfull conference.

In between conferencing, we went and explored the city with coworkers and colleagues from other schools. On Sunday, after we flew in, we were starving, so we met up with people and went immediately to dinner at the Trinity Brewhouse:







It was a short walk from our hotel, and I was so hungry after travelling all day that I ate a whole ten inch pizza. (Not because I'm fat. Because I'm hungry. That's the story we're sticking with, ok?)

The next morning I got more than enough exercise to make up for it, as four of us decided to walk down the riverwalk:





to eat at breakfast at Brickway on Wickenden, a place that had been recommended by the tourist map our friend Carling had and by the hotel staff. When we got there, it was a cute little diner:





that was almost like eating in someone's house. I had banana pancakes:



and they were delicious.

Tuesday we stayed at the convention center all day, which was sort of interesting because we were sharing it with a much larger hair stylist convention (so much multicolored hair and leopard print in one place!) and another, smaller conference where this was a topic:



I listened at the door for a minute, but heard only silence.

Tuesday night, Meg, Josh, and I decided that we were tired and just wanted something close, so we ate at the Melting Pot in the mall across the street from our hotel:



Since there was a skybridge connecting the hotel and the mall, we didn't even go outside.

The conference wrapped up Wednesday afternoon, so Meg, John, and I decided to walk to Federal Hill, which was ten minutes from our hotel and is the "Little Italy" of Providence:



The sculpture, La Pigna, is not an odd pineapple. It is a pinecone, which is a symbol of welcome in Italy. Federal Hill is a mass of small shops:



and Italian restaurants:





We picked one at random, and I ate four cheese ravioli as big as my fist. I've never felt so full of Italian food in my life, and the walk did nothing to make me feel like I'd worked any of it off. It was fantastic.

On Thursday we weren't flying out until lunchtime (and, thanks to incompetence and outright lies from United Airlines, we ended up spending twelve hours on planes or in airports; I'm not even going to talk about it because I'm still so mad), so Meg and I decided that we were going to walk the historic Green Line:



We were told that the Green Line, which passes many historic and architecturally significant buildings in Providence, was a loop, so we thought we would just join it by our hotel where we saw it and start walking. It turns out that, rather than listen to others, we should have looked it up, because the Green Line isn't a loop. It's exactly what it says: a line, and it ran out at the state capital after a half hour of fighting our way through six downtown crosswalks:







(My camera couldn't decide if it was too bright out or overcast, one of the dangers of point and click photography. The two pictures of the capital building above were taken within a minute or two of each other, with no change in clouds or sunshine.)

Once we discovered that we'd picked the wrong end of the Green Line, we realized that we didn't have time to walk it to the other end before we had to be back at the hotel for checkout, so we went to Burnside Park, which was just up the street, to walk around and look at the statues.

There's a fountain dedicated to General Burnside's wife:



(Is it me, or is that guy on the right kind of giving you a "hey, baby" eye?)

a weird half boat:





emerging from the ground or sinking into it, depending on whether you are a "glass is half empty" or "glass is half full" type of person, a statue of General Burnside himself:









which was heavily chalked and marked up by the Occupy Providence movement (Side note: many of the Occupy Providence participants in the park were reportedly Brown University students, who pay about $55,000 a year to attend their school; they may want to rethink protesting big business, and protest a little closer to campus instead), and this fence art:



I'm not sure how it was done, but if you looked at it straight on it didn't really look like anything:



and only turned back to art when you started walking along the fence and caught it at the right angle:



Leaving the park, we saw a sad drunk babydoll:



and the war memorial:



After that, we came to another, smaller park (or possibly a part of Burnside Park that was split by a plaza) with another statue:



and some kinetic sculptures that had words on one side and art on the other. One told the story of Roger Williams' early dealings with the Native Americans:



One talked about the founding of the city and present-day events:





and one talked about famous Providence native H.P. Lovecraft:





There were others, too, but we realized that we didn't have time to read them if we wanted to make our plane.