Our trip to Rhode Island

My Mom and I took Claire up to Rhode Island for a few days to visit Zia Maria and other family and friends! Our flight left on Thursday at 5:55 AM, which meant a 4:15 AM wake up for Miss Claire. I was hoping she would stay asleep, but no such luck. She stayed awake on the drive to the airport, through security and on the whole first leg of our flight, Palm Beach to Atlanta. On the second leg of our journey, Atlanta to Providence, she finally took a short nap. What I did learn though was travel safety rules do not apply to toddlers or persons traveling with toddlers! Our plane was leaving the ground and I found myself completely unbuckled and Claire sitting on the floor at my feet, the flight attendants couldn't care less! On our last flight home on Monday, the flight attendant pretty much told us she didn't care what Claire did as long as we were next to her, and she was quiet! (the last part was implied, but the message came across loud and clear). Claire's favorite thing to do to pass the time was opening and closing the window shade and saying "up", "down", "up", "down", oh, and also turning the reading lights on and off. Why do kids like repetition? Anyway, once we got to Providence, Maria picked us up, we installed Claire's car seat and we went to Lucky Garden to pick up Chinese food to bring to Reenie's for lunch. We visited and had lunch with Reenie, but then it was time to go so Claire could get a nap in before dinner. When we got to Maria's apartment, Claire got to meet her cats, and apparently Claire cannot say "Cats" because she was chasing them around yelling "Ass!" "Ass!". Oh dear! We met family and friends (Barbara, Maureen and David, and Cathy) for dinner at Gregg's. By the time we left Gregg's it was about 8 PM, an hour past Claire's bedtime, and she had been up since 4 AM (3 1/2 hours before normal wake up time) with only 2 cat naps all day, but she was giddy as all get out. Even the people in the booth next to us commented that she was holding up pretty good!! :)

On Friday, we were going to go to the zoo, but it was cold and rainy so we just decided to spend a relaxing day and go down to Galilee for chowda' and clamcakes. Yummy! Well we don't know what set her off, one minute she was fine and seconds later Claire had the meltdown of her young life! She was throwing herself on the floor of the restaurant and everything! It was crazy! My mom took her next door to the gift shop while Maria and I finished off our order of steamer clams (So Yummy!!) when we got to her she had JUST settled down. What set her off was still a mystery, possibly the man in the booth behind us that bolted as soon as she went crack wild? Anyway, once she settled down we took a walk around Galilee but it was cold and rainy so we didn't stay very long. On the way home we went by Del's lemonade, a RI tradition. Claire totally enjoyed her frozen lemonade! We went back to Maria's before dinner and Claire took a good nap, which was much needed. For dinner we went to Ichigo Ichie, a Japanese restaurant. Claire ate just about three bowls of the soup that comes with the hibachi dinner! She really really wanted to eat with chopsticks, so the waitress brought her a "kiddie pair" and her and I muddled through dinner together with them. Oh, she kills me with her independence!

On Saturday, I suggested we go to Cape Cod to see the potato chip factory (Maria had mentioned it earlier and I thought it sounded like fun), well she neglected to mention that they are only open Monday through Friday, so we already missed our opportunity! I was so bummed! We decided to take Claire to Chuck E. Cheese instead for lunch. There really wasn't a whole lot for her to do there, but we had fun for an hour or so, then we were done. It was Saturday afternoon and the place was chock full of screaming animals. Aye-yai-yai! On the way home we stopped once again for frozen lemonade, this time watermelon flavor from Mr. Lemon! I haven't had that since I was 10! We had dinner at Maria's house and Claire fell asleep at her normal bedtime and we watched the Richmond race. I will point out that both Kyle Busch and Matt Kenseth missed the Chase, which is what I was hoping for, yay!

On Sunday we took Claire down to Roger Williams park to feed the ducks. When we were kids we used to take a big bag of popcorn for this adventure, but we took some slices of bread. At first Claire just threw the bread pieces on the ground, then I held her as she threw some out in the water, then she got brave and handed a piece to a goose. The goose took the bread and then waited for more. Claire got another piece out of the bag and handed it to the goose, and the goose bit the bread AND Claire's finger! Oops! She only cried for a second though, what a tough girl. After the park it was time to go to the airport. We hung out in the airport, Claire had dinner, and then we boarded our flight to Atlanta. The plane took off and a few minutes into the flight the pilot announced we had to return to Providence because our landing gear was stuck down! So, we returned to Providence and we all got off the plane. It was the last flight of the day to Atlanta, and they had to fly in a maintenance crew to work on the plane (!) so needless to say the flight was cancelled! We got rebooked on a flight Monday afternoon, but the only flight we could get home was through Detroit to Ft. Lauderdale. We called Maria, she picked us back up at the airport and we headed back to her place for another evening of sleeping on air mattresses! The bright side was that since we weren't able to go to Cape Cod on Saturday, we now had our opportunity Monday morning!

We got up bright and early Monday and headed down to the Cape. It was about an hour and a half drive. We got there and took our tour of the potato chip factory, it was pretty cool! We got some fresh Cape Cod chips to bring home and we drove back to Rhode Island. We had lunch at Chelo's before we had to go back to the airport again for take two. This time our flight took off without a hitch, we had a short layover in Detroit (I don't think I've ever been to Detroit, they have a nice airport) and then home to Ft. Lauderdale. Claire was almost asleep the last 5 minutes of the first flight but we kept her awake so she would fall asleep on the second flight. Then she was almost asleep walking down the jet way to the second plane, and we had to wake her up to get out of her stroller, well then "overtired" kicked in and she was a bit of a bear the first 10 minutes of the second flight. Once we took off though she fell fast asleep and slept the whole 3 hours home. Kristen and Thomas (what troupers!) picked us up in Ft. Lauderdale at 10:30 PM and drove us to our car that Chadd dropped off at PBI when he flew out that afternoon. By the time we got home it was 12:30 AM Tuesday morning! But, we got an extra day on our vacation and we had fun!