Today’s mission was simple on paper: drive south, past Boston, all the way down to Providence, Rhode Island. In practice, “simple” travel days in New England always seem to involve at least three unplanned detours, and this one was no exception.

After a quick hotel breakfast, we started our long drive..

York Beach: Empty and Perfect

Our first stop was York Beach, a gorgeous stretch of sand that gets absolutely mobbed on sunny summer days. Luckily for us, the weather wasn’t cooperating enough to draw a crowd, which meant we scored easy parking and had the view practically to ourselves.

There’s something to be said for a slightly overcast beach day when it means you’re not circling a parking lot for 45 minutes. We snapped a few photos, breathed in the salt air, and moved on.

Nubble Lighthouse and Its Flying Grocery Cart

Next up was the Nubble Lighthouse, officially known as Cape Neddick Light, perched on its own tiny rocky island just 600 feet off the coast. It’s impossibly cute, framed by a scattering of coastal mansions and one of the best photo backdrops in Maine.

Here’s the detail that makes this lighthouse genuinely fascinating: since it sits on its own little island with no dock nearby, the lighthouse keepers who lived and worked here for over a century needed a way to get supplies across the water. The solution was an aerial cable car system, essentially a small wooden box suspended on a cable strung between telephone poles on the mainland and the island. It carried groceries, tools, replacement equipment, and, according to local lore, sometimes even the keeper’s own cranky pet cat. There’s a wonderful (if slightly terrifying) old account of the keeper once having to transport a full-size upright refrigerator across the channel this way, by hand, cable car style.

The lighthouse itself was first lit in 1879, was tended by more than a dozen keepers over the decades, and was finally automated in 1987, making it one of the last lighthouses in North America to give up its live-in keeper. The Town of York has owned and maintained it since 1997.

We drove around the surrounding neighborhood a bit longer, soaking in more coastal views, before continuing on toward New Hampshire.

A Quick, Charming Stop in Portsmouth

We rolled into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a genuinely cute town, though a small one. You really only need a couple of hours here to see the highlights.

We grabbed coffee and croissants and waited out a rain shower before heading back out to explore on foot.

Portsmouth has a great cluster of art galleries scattered through its compact downtown, and Sarah found a lovely local artist selling handmade earrings, which she happily added to her collection.

Sarah has a running tradition of buying a pair of earrings on every trip, since they double as both a meaningful souvenir and something she’ll actually wear afterward, unlike, say, a magnet or a shot glass gathering dust in a drawer. Efficient sentimentality at its finest.

We found this funny Tesla with the sticker “I identify as Prius”. It was very very hard to explain the joke to Ariela, so we just changed topic and offered a snack.

We enjoyed our short time wandering Portsmouth’s streets, but with the clock ticking and Providence still hours away, we got back on the road.

Providence: Feasting First, Questions Later

After a long stretch of driving, we finally rolled into Providence, and did what any reasonable traveling family does upon arrival: went straight to dinner.

We found an outstanding Syrian restaurant called Aleppo Sweets, and it did not disappoint. We ordered kibbeh, tabbouleh alongside genuinely world-class hummus, and a Syrian red lentil soup with lemon that none of us had ever tried before. The food was AMAZING and Eitan had the best kibbeh he has ever tried.

Naturally, we capped off the feast with baklava, because you cannot walk away from a Middle Eastern meal without at least one more bite of honeyed pastry.

We checked into our hotel, the Omni in downtown Providence, to freshen up. It was a perfectly nice hotel, in the sense that it was clearly a very nice hotel roughly 40 years ago, and it has not been shy about showing its age since.

The RISD Museum and a 1,800-Year-Old Grudge

After resting for a little bit, we walked over to the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and got lucky: it happened to be free admission after 5pm that particular day of the week. We took full advantage.

Ariela gravitated toward the modern art wing and the Egyptian collection, clearly a girl of eclectic taste.

I feel this is a good time to share one of Ariela’s photos that she has proudly taken.

Eitan, meanwhile, was completely captivated by the Greek and Roman galleries, which hold some genuinely stunning pieces. The absolute standout: a Roman marble sarcophagus carved with a scene straight out of Book 22 of Homer’s Iliad, showing Achilles dragging the dead body of Hector behind his chariot around the walls of Troy, while Hector’s grieving father King Priam and wife Andromache look on in horror. It’s one of only a small handful of surviving sarcophagi depicting Trojan War scenes anywhere in the world, and this particular one was painstakingly reassembled from over 100 separate fragments before finding its permanent home at the museum back in 1921.

Eitan tried to explain the Trojan war to Ariela, but she was not that interested unfortunately. We are sure Eitan will try again in a few years.

They also had a nice collection of roman and greek coins, and other amazing pieces from other cultures.

The museum held plenty of other remarkable pieces beyond that, but once Ariela’s five-year-old museum attention span officially expired, we knew it was time to head out.

We walked back to the hotel through pouring rain and collapsed into a well-earned sleep.

Next stop on the trip: Mystic, Connecticut. Stay tuned.

Bonus Pic of the Day: The Mini School Buses

All along our drive through this stretch of New England, we kept spotting these vans dressed up like miniature school buses, just built on a much smaller chassis. Our working theory is that some of these smaller, more rural towns simply don’t have enough kids on a given route to justify sending out a full-size bus, so they deploy these compact versions instead. And apparently they’re not just for show: they follow the exact same rules as their full-size cousins, meaning if one of these little vans stops to pick up a kid, you legally cannot pass it. Small bus, same authority.

2nd Bonus Pic of the Day:

This building in Providence looked very familiar to me. Popularly known as the “Superman Building” because of its resemblance to the iconic Daily Planet building, the Industrial Trust Co. Building is the tallest — at 428 feet tall — and the most iconic in the Providence skyline.