Another day. Another Xanax.
I keep forgetting to tell you all stories and then I think of them after I hit publish, so this is all a little out of order.
But I have enlisted the help of my trust "Notes" app on my iPhone to keep track of what I want to tell you.
Hopefully my drug-fueled notes make sense to me each night when I sit down to write this literary masterpiece.
Yesterday when we were on our way home from Martha's Vineyard, we were passing a lot of trees. Just regular old trees. So she asks me if I ever learned a poem in school and recites like one or two lines that are totally unfamiliar to me. I tell her that I do not, in fact, know that poem.
(But if she wants A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne - I'm her girl!)
She apparently had to learn it in school back in New York. And then, and I kind of wish I was kidding, she starts singing the poem in song. Her kids and grandkids can only imagine this, as I know that every one of them has heard her break out into song randomly at some point in their life. I almost died.
...
A little run down of how our days go because I don't think I've told you before. Typically about an hour before we have to be on the bus our luggage has to be outside of our door for the guys to load. Then we can finish with any of the stuff we will carry on the bus with us. Then it is downstairs for a buffet breakfast and onto the bus for the day's activities.
The first night she decided that she would get up first and get in the shower and then she would wake me up for my shower and we would finish getting ready.
This is not what happens people.
She wakes up when the phone rings with the wake up call. But only after she has knocked everything off of the night stand and yelled "shit!" at least once. Then she gets in the shower and proceeds to get herself completely ready before she comes back out and lets me go in.
The good news is that I have been taking showers and semi-drying my hair at night after the gym. The bad news is, this typically leaves me in the realm of 35-40 minutes to straighten my hair, put on my make-up, brush my teeth, get dressed, and pack before I have to have my suitcase outside.
Speaking of suitcases - I bet some of your grandparents have furniture that they have covered in plastic to preserve. Well, Granny B has taken that shit one step further and she has plastic covers for luggage. No, this is not a joke. In theory, I'm sure it is a great idea. In practice, it is like a damn circus when she tries to get all of the zippers on the luggage closed, followed by getting the plastic in the right place, followed by closing those zippers. This almost certainly adds 10 minutes to our morning routine.
And this morning, she forgot to put her pjs in, so after 8.5 minutes when she finally had everything almost zipped up, I came out of the bathroom and saw them and she had to go through the entire game again.
We finally made it onto the bus and the tour began. We left Hyannis this morning, headed to Newport, RI. Our first stop was "The Breakers" the famous mansion of the Vanderbilts. Holy shit! That place was amazing. And furthermore, I would live in their kitchen for all of eternity if I could. It was beautiful.
The way the tours at the Breakers work is when you walk in they hand you a headset and a little walkie-talkie like thing. And you press a number and it tells you where to go. It tells you about all of the interesting stuff in the particular room you are in and when to move to the next room, etc.
If you are a slow walker, no problem because you just press play when you get to the next place.
But you have to listen. You can't just meander around rooms willy nilly. She was in one room trying to tell me that it was the Morning Room, when really she just didn't stop long enough in the Morning Room to hear what they were saying.
If at some point down the road she is trying to tell you something about the Vanderbilts, just nod your head, it won't make sense because it isn't the truth.
I know that part of the reason for her rushing through the tour was that she gets tired and needs to sit down. So, I followed behind her like a dutiful granddaughter and we got through. I even found the exit that didn't require her to use stairs so that she could go down and visit the gift shop. To buy a scarf.
Just a scarf. Like one you can get at your local department store.
Post-Breakers we headed into the town of Newport for lunch. Our tour guide is very good at recommending things for everyone, including places for people who can't walk very far. On this stop, that happened to be the Marriott. So we get off of the bus and start walking, I suggest that we eat at the Marriott because everything else is like 6 and 8 blocks away. She doesn't want to do what I say, so we walk a block and a half past the hotel and she says, "It's too cold to be walking out here." So we turn around and go back to the Marriott restaurant.
We enjoy a surprisingly good lunch in a fairly short amount of time and there is about an hour to kill before we have to get back on the bus. There are a few shops across the street, I figure we can be in and out of there in no time. She only walks into one of them and decides she just wants ice cream. We stop for a hot fudge sundae and as she is finishing, she says, "We only have 20 minutes, they are probably letting us on the bus now." I agree so I clean up her mess and we start walking back to the bus.
Then, out of nowhere, she apparently gets a burst of energy and can't live without going into the Yankee Candle Co. Store. Are you freaking kidding me? I practically ran through the Breakers because you didn't have the energy, but all of the sudden you just can't live without the stupid red vase at the Yankee Candle Co.? Oh, and bee tee dub, we have those in Arizona. And they have a catalog.
I finally get her out of there with eight minutes to make it to the bus, armed with a catalog so she can order the stupid vases.
(I tried to get the catalogs from her and put them in my backpack, no such luck, Ladies.)
Since they bill this trip as a Fall Foliage trip, it is only appropriate to see some leaves change color, so our bus driver and tour guide took us the back way out of Newport, past the University of Rhode Island. The tour guide must have said at least 50 times that we would be passing the University. And about five minutes before we passed it, he said, "The University of Rhode Island sports fields will be on the right." As we approach them, she says, "What are all these cars here for? Must be some kind of school or college."
O.M.G., Mommy...
We also got to see the Mystic Seaport today, something I would enjoy seeing more of at a later date. A very interesting history there. Also, we drove past Mystic Pizza (of Julia Roberts fame), but I didn't get a picture. Because despite the free shuttle from the hotel to downtown Mystic, we ate at the hotel bar tonight. Delicious food - let me tell you...
For those property rights fanatics out there, we also drove through New London, CT of Kilo v. New London fame.
Tomorrow we head up to the Normal Rockwell Museum and Vermont. And please pray for me because tomorrow night is the Presidential Debate and I'm just not sure I'll survive watching it with her.
We are staying in time share condos tomorrow so they are taking us to a little market on our way in case we want to get food and drinks and stay in for the night - I'm thinking a nice bottle of wine and I can get her to pass out early.
I keep forgetting to tell you all stories and then I think of them after I hit publish, so this is all a little out of order.
But I have enlisted the help of my trust "Notes" app on my iPhone to keep track of what I want to tell you.
Hopefully my drug-fueled notes make sense to me each night when I sit down to write this literary masterpiece.
Yesterday when we were on our way home from Martha's Vineyard, we were passing a lot of trees. Just regular old trees. So she asks me if I ever learned a poem in school and recites like one or two lines that are totally unfamiliar to me. I tell her that I do not, in fact, know that poem.
(But if she wants A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne - I'm her girl!)
She apparently had to learn it in school back in New York. And then, and I kind of wish I was kidding, she starts singing the poem in song. Her kids and grandkids can only imagine this, as I know that every one of them has heard her break out into song randomly at some point in their life. I almost died.
...
A little run down of how our days go because I don't think I've told you before. Typically about an hour before we have to be on the bus our luggage has to be outside of our door for the guys to load. Then we can finish with any of the stuff we will carry on the bus with us. Then it is downstairs for a buffet breakfast and onto the bus for the day's activities.
The first night she decided that she would get up first and get in the shower and then she would wake me up for my shower and we would finish getting ready.
This is not what happens people.
She wakes up when the phone rings with the wake up call. But only after she has knocked everything off of the night stand and yelled "shit!" at least once. Then she gets in the shower and proceeds to get herself completely ready before she comes back out and lets me go in.
The good news is that I have been taking showers and semi-drying my hair at night after the gym. The bad news is, this typically leaves me in the realm of 35-40 minutes to straighten my hair, put on my make-up, brush my teeth, get dressed, and pack before I have to have my suitcase outside.
Speaking of suitcases - I bet some of your grandparents have furniture that they have covered in plastic to preserve. Well, Granny B has taken that shit one step further and she has plastic covers for luggage. No, this is not a joke. In theory, I'm sure it is a great idea. In practice, it is like a damn circus when she tries to get all of the zippers on the luggage closed, followed by getting the plastic in the right place, followed by closing those zippers. This almost certainly adds 10 minutes to our morning routine.
And this morning, she forgot to put her pjs in, so after 8.5 minutes when she finally had everything almost zipped up, I came out of the bathroom and saw them and she had to go through the entire game again.
We finally made it onto the bus and the tour began. We left Hyannis this morning, headed to Newport, RI. Our first stop was "The Breakers" the famous mansion of the Vanderbilts. Holy shit! That place was amazing. And furthermore, I would live in their kitchen for all of eternity if I could. It was beautiful.
The way the tours at the Breakers work is when you walk in they hand you a headset and a little walkie-talkie like thing. And you press a number and it tells you where to go. It tells you about all of the interesting stuff in the particular room you are in and when to move to the next room, etc.
If you are a slow walker, no problem because you just press play when you get to the next place.
But you have to listen. You can't just meander around rooms willy nilly. She was in one room trying to tell me that it was the Morning Room, when really she just didn't stop long enough in the Morning Room to hear what they were saying.
If at some point down the road she is trying to tell you something about the Vanderbilts, just nod your head, it won't make sense because it isn't the truth.
I know that part of the reason for her rushing through the tour was that she gets tired and needs to sit down. So, I followed behind her like a dutiful granddaughter and we got through. I even found the exit that didn't require her to use stairs so that she could go down and visit the gift shop. To buy a scarf.
Just a scarf. Like one you can get at your local department store.
Post-Breakers we headed into the town of Newport for lunch. Our tour guide is very good at recommending things for everyone, including places for people who can't walk very far. On this stop, that happened to be the Marriott. So we get off of the bus and start walking, I suggest that we eat at the Marriott because everything else is like 6 and 8 blocks away. She doesn't want to do what I say, so we walk a block and a half past the hotel and she says, "It's too cold to be walking out here." So we turn around and go back to the Marriott restaurant.
We enjoy a surprisingly good lunch in a fairly short amount of time and there is about an hour to kill before we have to get back on the bus. There are a few shops across the street, I figure we can be in and out of there in no time. She only walks into one of them and decides she just wants ice cream. We stop for a hot fudge sundae and as she is finishing, she says, "We only have 20 minutes, they are probably letting us on the bus now." I agree so I clean up her mess and we start walking back to the bus.
Then, out of nowhere, she apparently gets a burst of energy and can't live without going into the Yankee Candle Co. Store. Are you freaking kidding me? I practically ran through the Breakers because you didn't have the energy, but all of the sudden you just can't live without the stupid red vase at the Yankee Candle Co.? Oh, and bee tee dub, we have those in Arizona. And they have a catalog.
I finally get her out of there with eight minutes to make it to the bus, armed with a catalog so she can order the stupid vases.
(I tried to get the catalogs from her and put them in my backpack, no such luck, Ladies.)
Since they bill this trip as a Fall Foliage trip, it is only appropriate to see some leaves change color, so our bus driver and tour guide took us the back way out of Newport, past the University of Rhode Island. The tour guide must have said at least 50 times that we would be passing the University. And about five minutes before we passed it, he said, "The University of Rhode Island sports fields will be on the right." As we approach them, she says, "What are all these cars here for? Must be some kind of school or college."
O.M.G., Mommy...
We also got to see the Mystic Seaport today, something I would enjoy seeing more of at a later date. A very interesting history there. Also, we drove past Mystic Pizza (of Julia Roberts fame), but I didn't get a picture. Because despite the free shuttle from the hotel to downtown Mystic, we ate at the hotel bar tonight. Delicious food - let me tell you...
For those property rights fanatics out there, we also drove through New London, CT of Kilo v. New London fame.
Tomorrow we head up to the Normal Rockwell Museum and Vermont. And please pray for me because tomorrow night is the Presidential Debate and I'm just not sure I'll survive watching it with her.
We are staying in time share condos tomorrow so they are taking us to a little market on our way in case we want to get food and drinks and stay in for the night - I'm thinking a nice bottle of wine and I can get her to pass out early.
I can't pray for you because I can't quit laughing my a.. off at your post. You need to write a book, even if its a short story one. This is too good not to share with the world. I can't wait to read about watching the debate with your Nonni.
ReplyDeleteI'm the property rights fanatic that just got excited that you were in New London, CT!!
ReplyDelete