Friday: Takoma Park, MD to Providence, RI

It took us over ten hours to make the six-state drive to Providence for the first of three college visits we did over North’s spring break. It could have been done more quickly, but we took a lot of breaks for lunch, restroom visits, and for those of us with hourly step goals to try to meet them. I also need to walk every hour or two to prevent leg cramps.

We ordered pizza ahead of our arrival, but apparently not early enough because when we got to the busy pizzeria, the friendly young man at the counter said it wasn’t going to be ready for another forty-five minutes. That was what the app said, too, but we thought it might have been a mistake because we’d ordered almost an hour earlier. I was hungry and it was almost eight and I try not to eat after eight p.m., so I bought a slice, or I tried to—he gave it to me for free, stage-whispering not to tell anyone. I ate it in the car. It was good.

We settled into the house and Beth went back to get the much-anticipated pizza. Beth and North ate their slices while we watched the first forty minutes of Do the Right Thing. I’d nominated this film for family movie night, back in February for Black History Month, and now on the last day of March, we were getting around to it. We were too tired to watch the whole thing, though.

Saturday: Providence and Environs

The next morning, we attended the open house for Johnson and Wales University’s culinary school. This school offers the only bachelor’s degree in Baking and Pastry Arts in the country, and it is currently North’s top choice.

The event began with a scavenger hunt in the Culinary Arts Museum. There were spaces to explore, like a diner built in the 1920s and a colonial era tavern. (It wasn’t clear to me if they were real or recreations.) North had a list of things to find, such as the jacket of a celebrity chef and a prototype of the microwave from the 1940s. It was fun and North found all the items on the list. Unfortunately, they missed hearing when you were supposed to turn in the paper, so they didn’t win a bag of cooking utensils and swag.

I sampled a small cinnamon roll from the table of student-baked treats, and we visited several booths, including one for study abroad and another for accessibility services. The woman at that booth was surprisingly discouraging about accommodations for a student with chronic pain and mobility issues.

We proceeded to a panel discussion. While we waited for it to start, we discussed how the school seems to have two mascots. The official one is the Wildcats, but the school’s logo includes the flag of Wales, which has a dragon on it (although at first, I thought it was a griffin). You actually see as many if not more dragons than wildcats in the graphics around campus. Depending on how far you can zoom in, you might see one on the right side of the chef’s jacket North’s wearing in the first photo, across from the words “Future Wildcat.”

At the panel, a dean and about a half dozen professors who described the program and explained how the different tracks in the culinary school are structured. A few of them stressed how JWU’s culinary school is unique in that it’s housed in a university and students also take academic classes. Toward the end, during the Q&A Beth asked about accessibility again and got a very different, more positive answer from the dean. So that’s something to investigate in more detail because except for this one concern, North is really sold on this school. At the discussion we picked up samples of student-made confectionary. I choose a bag of salted caramels that I saved for later—they were excellent.

We went on a tour next. There are two campuses, one in downtown Providence and another on Narragansett Bay. The culinary school is in the harborside campus, though students can also take any academic classes that aren’t offered there in the downtown campus. We toured the two main harborside classroom buildings, which were bustling for a Saturday morning. Several clubs were meeting—including a Latin American cuisine club that was holding a competition and a baking club. We were invited in to watch students present their meals and baked goods, and we were offered pastry samples. I had an almond cookie even though I’d already had a cinnamon roll and I did not regret it. (It reminded me strongly of a tart I used to get at the Portuguese bakery in Provincetown where Beth and I often travelled back in our twenties and thirties. That and the fact that something called “New England coffeecake” was on offer made me wonder if that day’s baking focus was New England regional pastry.)

We could have boarded a bus to tour the downtown campus at this point, but there wouldn’t have been time for lunch if we did that, so we decided to wander around downtown Providence on our own later. We checked out a food court-style dining hall where North could have used their visitor’s badge for 10% off, but they were in the mood for Panera, so we went to one just across the Massachusetts border, before walking around the downtown Providence campus. We tried to go to the Admissions Office and the bookstore, but they had both closed for the day.

While we were driving to Rhode Island the day before we’d glimpsed the ocean from the highway (in Connecticut) and that got me in the mood to see it again. We considered going to the beach that afternoon, but it was late afternoon by the time we got back to the house, and we were farther inland now, almost an hour away from the Atlantic, so we decided Greenwich Bay was a better idea.

However, North didn’t want to risk leaving the house during prime migraine time because they get one in the late afternoon more often than not these days and they were saving their last dose of the really effective medicine for the next night because we had evening plans. After some discussion, we decided to leave them alone in the house. We have not done this since they were hospitalized in October, though we’d been considering it for a while. It felt momentous and anticlimactic at the same time.

It was a short drive and a long walk to the bay. It was a scenic walk, though, along a wooded, riverside path. When we got to the beach, we sat on a bench and looked at the water for about fifteen minutes before we headed back.

When we got back, North had gone to bed with a headache after all, so it was just the two of us for dinner. After considering a few options, we ordered takeout from a Japanese restaurant the dean recommended during the part of his spiel in which he lauded the many fine dining options in Providence, where many alums work as chefs. His praise was not misplaced. We got several small dishes, and the garlic eggplant and crispy cauliflower were especially good. You should go there if you’re ever in Providence. It was very satisfying.

Sunday: Providence to New York, NY and Union City, NJ

Sunday morning, we drove to New York City. North was supposed to meet a friend from camp for lunch in Brooklyn, but the friend cancelled by text when we were right outside the city. That gave us enough time to reconsider our next destination and our lunch plans. We stopped at a pretty little park by the Hudson River, had a picnic, and regrouped.

We decided to go to Coney Island. It took us longer to get there than we thought it would—isn’t that always how it goes in New York?—and when we did there was no legal parking to be had anywhere so Beth kindly volunteered to stay with the illegally parked car just in case she had to move it and North and I took a quick jaunt to the amusement park and beach.

We had early evening theater ticket so we could only stay about forty-five minutes and we had different priorities. North was hungry for pizza and drawn to the wooden roller coaster and I just wanted to go to the beach. I bought two slices, one for North and one to take back to Beth, and North found it unsatisfactory as New York pizza. After they’d eaten the subpar pizza, I gave them money for the roller coaster, and they got in line. I took off my shoes and socks and walked on the beach for about ten minutes before North texted that the ride operators didn’t take cash. By that time it was too late to figure out how to get tickets and stand in line again, so we decided to get ice cream, hit the bathrooms, and meet up with Beth. The expedition didn’t go exactly as we hoped, but I did get to walk barefoot on the beach on a sunny day and eat strawberry cheesecake gelato, and that doesn’t happen every day.

We got to the theater (a converted church basement) where we were seeing Stranger Sings!, a musical parody of Stranger Things, a half hour before the show, which was a relief. If you’ve seen the source material (as North and I have), the show is funny and a lot of fun. If you haven’t (like Beth) it’s baffling, but she says she enjoyed it anyway so we will take her at her word.

We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant to get a post-show dinner of vegetable and tofu stir-fried noodles for North. The food came really quickly, and we took it back to our AirBnB in Union City, New Jersey. North liked it so well they left a glowing Yelp review.

Monday: Union City and New York to Takoma Park

On Monday we had a busy morning planned. We had a mid-afternoon tour of NYU and before then we had three stops. First was the Catacombs by Candlelight tour at Saint Patrick’s Old Cathedral. This consists of a guided tour of the outdoor cemetery at the Cathedral and the vaults underneath it. The guide gives a lot of historical information both above and below ground. It was a little less creepy than North was hoping for, I think—no stacks of skulls and bones like in the Paris catacombs they read about in a 39 Clues book in elementary school, just sealed vault doors lit with electric candles—but it was still atmospheric and interesting.

From there we visited a high-end chocolate shop, which was Beth’s primary goal for our day in New York. We all picked treats (mostly candy, but North got a jar of fancy olives). The only thing I’ve tried so far was a pistachio truffle, but it was so good it made me take the lord’s name in vain when I bit into it. I still have a dark chocolate-cherry bar to try.

North wanted a pizza do-over so we went to another place they’d found. Here I should mention that North planned a lot of our activities in New York and navigated us to them. It made them seem like someone who’s almost ready to go to college, maybe even in a big city. They found the pesto, olive, and fresh mozzarella pizza at Prince Street Pizza much more to their liking than the boardwalk pizza. There were outside stools and counters, though we needed to wait a while for other diners to vacate the stools. There’s a lot of open air or semi-enclosed sidewalk dining in New York. I’m guessing at least some of it was born of the pandemic. A lot of the spaces are quite decorated and festive, but this one was more utilitarian.

At NYU, students were only allowed one parent and as I enjoy these tours more than Beth does, she walked around Greenwich village and sat in Washington Square Park while North and I went on the tour. Oddly, there was no introductory information session, which I’ve come to expect. We watched a two-minute video and set out. The other strange thing was that the tour was almost entirely outside the buildings we visited. We didn’t enter a residence hall or dining hall or classroom, though we approached them. We did go inside the student center and the main library and it’s lovely, twelve stories with an atrium in the center and the floors all enclosed in glass with an abstract gold pattern painted on it. We learned that NYU’s mascot, the Bobcat, is named after the card catalog. Bobcat is short for Bobst Library Catalog. You’ve got to appreciate a school that names its sports teams after the library catalog. Our guide was affable and informative. North was especially impressed with the study-abroad opportunities.

By the time it was over, North was done in—between the catacombs, our perambulations through the neighborhood, and the campus tour, it had been a lot of walking. They were starting to drag, so they sat down at a table outside a café to rest while Beth fetched the car from the parking lot. I went inside to buy a flourless chocolate-walnut cookie to justify our presence, and while I was inside a young woman took the other chair at the table where North was sitting and did not leave when I stared at her, so I ate the cookie standing up.

It was around four-thirty when we hit the road. We had long drive home, so it was past our bedtime when we arrived, stashed our perishable food in the fridge, and fell into bed.

Tuesday: Takoma Park

We had a one-day, two-night pit stop at home. North rested and Beth and I worked. I wrote half of the April issue of an e-newsletter for a supplement company, did two loads of laundry, mailed a care package of Easter candy to Noah, and cleaned most of the kitchen (losing steam and leaving the kitchen floor un-mopped) and started writing this.

North got a migraine in the late afternoon and tried their new device which arrived in the mail while we were gone. You strap it to your arm, and it vibrates in a way that’s supposed to block migraine pain signals, but it didn’t work (at least this time) and they ended up napping the rest of the day.

Wednesday: Takoma Park to Saint Mary’s City, MD and Ridge, MD

Wednesday morning, we set out on the southern leg of our trip. We arrived at Saint Mary’s historic site around lunch time, so we had a picnic there. Saint Mary’s was the first settlement in Maryland and its capital in the seventeenth century. Now it’s a living history museum and archaeological site. All fourth graders in Maryland public schools visit it. The year North went, I chaperoned. Turns out I remember this trip a lot better than North does because everything there looked very familiar. We wandered around a little before it was time for our tour and decided to return the next day when we’d have more time.

Saint Mary’s College of Maryland is a public honors college that’s located right next to the historic site. It’s on the shore of Saint Mary’s River, which feeds into the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a gorgeous campus, full of red brick buildings, woods, and ponds. Their mascot is the Seahawks and we saw many actual seabirds, including ospreys, while we were there.

We listened to a presentation by an administrator and then set out for our tour. When North was registering for tours, Saint Mary’s was the only school that asked if the student had any accessibility needs, so North had requested a slower-paced tour. (They were able to keep up with the tours at JWU and NYU, but it was a concern ahead of time, and the NYU tour left them pretty wiped out.) We ended up with our own private tour, the three of us, plus two guides.

The tour was quite thorough. We went all over the small campus, and we saw the main dining hall, a dorm room (with a view of the pond), a townhouse (housing for juniors and seniors), the bookstore, and a classroom. We visited the boathouse where students can take out boats and paddleboards and saw students on the water and others sunbathing on the docks. We saw students wearing waders standing in the pond with nets and clipboards taking samples, presumably for a science class. The guide was attentive and at the end of the tour remembered to find out the answer to a question we’d asked that he didn’t know the answer to, even though we’d forgotten we’d asked.

After the tour, we checked into our AirBnB which was also on the water and had its own private dock on Saint Jerome Creek. It was so lovely we all sat out there for a half hour before we even unpacked. North went to bed with a headache soon after that, and I cooked dinner—vegetarian fish filets and roasted asparagus and carrots. Beth and I ate on the deck and then I went back to the dock to watch the sun set.

Thursday: Ridge and Saint Mary’s to Takoma

We didn’t have to be out of the house until noon, so we had a leisurely morning there. I ate my breakfast of yogurt, banana, and granola on the dock. North came to join me and we talked about the schools we visited and the college application process. Beth went for a walk and then went kayaking—the house had its own kayak you could use—and then I went for a walk. We got back about the same time and left the house to return to Saint Mary’s.

This time we bought tickets, and we took a guided tour of the Maryland Dove (a recreation of a seventeenth-century ship), a store, and a print shop, where we watched and participated in a demonstration of a printing press. We also wandered around some of the other buildings and read the historical signs about the people who lived and worked there. I was struck by the story of a woman who at the age of seventeen married a widower who had five children, and then bore him seven more. Being seventeen in the 1600s was a lot different than being seventeen now, I thought.

After a couple hours in Saint Mary’s, we left for lunch and our drive home. North’s considering a few more schools, so we’re not finished with college tours, but I think they’re off to a good start, with a lot of different ways to imagine their future—as a dragon/wildcat, a bobcat, or a seahawk.