what a weekend!

I am not lucky enough to actually get President's Day off, but I took it as a vacation day :) We had a pretty good weekend. It didn't start out all that exciting. I did my stats homework for 4 hours on Friday night, and Andrew had to help me figure out how to put it into Excel. We finished around 10 and then caught up on Grey's. I was most unhappy to see Denny, even for a second, but other than that it was a pretty good episode. Then on Saturday we went to Quincy and did our laundry from 10:30 till 6:00 - can you tell we don't do laundry that often? It's hard to not have laundry here. Well we do, but we have to pay for it and they are so tiny that it takes about $10 just to wash and dry two loads. So to Quincy we went. My parents bought us coffee, my mother made us grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, and we watched The Wedding Singer. Which makes it a pretty good Saturday! We were on our way back to Canton around 6:30ish and we couldn't figure out what we wanted to do with our night. Neither one of us was really hungry (thanks to my parents' mini bagels!) and we weren't really feeling the movies, or going home to sit around and do nothing. So Andrew called up Laney in Manch and we randomly decided to head up to Manchester and hang out with Vallone, Laney, and Jen and Jess and Dutch... who apparently has a real name, but I don't know what it is. That was fun - Margarita's is always a good time. So we got home from that night out on the town in Manch around 1ish and got up on Sunday and went to Newport for the remainder of the weekend. Newport in February is still cool, and it wasn't biterly cold. We toured two mansions (Rosecliff and the Breakers), ate at a cute little Greek restuarant for lunch, walked around downtown for a bit, and got drinks at an Irish pub and ate at The Brick Alley Pub. I highly recommend it if you are in the Newport area. We stayed at an adorable B&B called Bayberry Inn. Even though we aren't B&B people, we still had a good time. Here are some pictures.

This is the back of Rosecliff - it's somewhat modeled after Versailles, which is why there are only 2 floors. There is actually a "hidden" small third floor for the servants, but you can only see it from certain angles (clearly the servants did not need a lot of space if they managed to "hide" their quarters). Rosecliff was really nice and if you have seen The Great Gatsby or True Lies you have already seen the ballroom, which is the biggest one of the mansions.

This is the view of another mansion from the yard at Rosecliff. I don't know which one it is, but it certainly has a prime location! The chimmneys you can see way behind the mansion on the left belong to The Breakers. That's the Cliff Walk you can see below the yards

Me at the wall at Rosecliff. That wall is probably worth more than I am. Nice to have boatloads of money before there was income tax. (these manions were built during the Guilded Age, which is a nice way to say "people started making money as we became an industrialized nation and there was nothing else to spend their money on" The Guilded Age ended three years after income tax came in)

This is the view of the The Breakers from the front. It was built by the Vanderbilts in 1893 and cost approx $5 million BACK THEN. Today it's beyond priceless because of all the handcrafted workmanship in it. Two of the rooms were actually made in Paris and shipped here.

View of The Breakers from the back. These pictures do not do it justice for the sheer size of everything. There is a room inside that has a 50 foot ceiling.

This is the Bayberry Inn. It's a converted "mansion". If you can call it a mansion after seeing the big ones. But it's very cute and has a dining room I would kill for.

When we were leaving on Monday, this cat was waiting for us outside. He went right up to Andrew and started rubbing up against his leg. We think he lives at the Inn since he certainly seemed at home. Or else he wanted to be adopted, kind of like Kitty!