Rhode Island, It's For Me

Who knew that's Rhode Island's state song? Not me.

Good Friday was indeed a GOOD FRIDAY! We spent the day in Newport, RI.
It's only 2 hours away and full of backroad awesomeness and the ever wierd Frog Statues on the bridge in Willamantic.

Newport is famous for its mansions but the kids don't care about that kind of stuff yet. It was an outdoorsy, ocean, hiking day for us.
We began doing the Cliff Walk trail. We ended up doing about 4 miles of it. Mary was excited off the bat!
Oh the kids were LOVING the ocean. It was definitely a calm ocean day.
Andrew was in heaven. He was a climbing, exploring boy. He also liked getting as close as he possible could to the water.
Whit and her dad.

All that walking wore Matt out. Little did he know a 2 mile run soon awaited him.

Mary and Andrew loved getting to the points of the walk when you could get out on the big rocks--they tried to see how close they could get to the seagulls. Hard to believe, but we didn't catch a single one.
This gives a pretty good idea of all the fun climbing there was. Annie was a trooper and also insane. She was clueless walking over the big rocks--she'd just hold your hand and go, practically falling a kajillion times.

There is a trolley that runs on the main road from one end of the cliff walk to the other. I hadn't thought about it being off season. We waited but no trolley. Apparently they do the full route from Memorial Day to Columbus Day but at this point of the year only do the middle of the route, between the mansions.

If we would have walked a few blocks more we might have seen the trolley but instead, Matt took off running. It ended up being about 2 miles he ran (he finally saw a trolley when he had about 2 blocks to go).
I had the joy of entertaining tired, hungry kids for the next 20 minutes (oh, I mean 10--matt is so fast). Here they are pretending to sleep. Here's Annie trying to get some air--looks like she got about 1/4 inch of it!

We finally got back to the car and then headed on the scenic drive and stopped at Brenton Point State Park for a picnic and kite flying. The wind was fierce--there were probably 20 other kites flying along with ours. Notice my bundled up kids. They wore jackets and we brought coats in the car. They ate lunch with both coat AND jacket on.

Then we headed to Easton Beach. It was pretty much desereted and full of shells. The kids were in heaven again! It was here that everyone went from trying to get as close as they could to the water without getting wet to just getting wet.
It was here that we also started all being wierd and silly.
I tried to have Annie and Whit do the run away from the waves run with me. Apparently no one else got the memo.

It was a sad moment realizing she should have run.
We flew the kite again--Mary did it for a long time. Annie remained in this squatting position for at least 30 minutes. When she finally stood up, she said "my legs feel wierd" and walked around so strange for the next little bit. Funny.
Here I am kite flying with approximately 7.26 inches of string. The wind was crazy!
Check out those leggies! I think this was these 2 ladies favorite part.Still squatting....
After the beach, we headed home and made it home just in time for bed. Literally a perfect day!