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Providence, Rhode Island
There's no time for second guessing or catching your breath
Every year at about this time (its January by the way), I debate whether or not to still call these slideshows Weekend Trips or if I should come up with a better name, maybe something like Miscellaneous or (hopefully) something better. When I first started putting this site together, Weekend Trips as a name made sense- for proof, just go and look here at the four part, 23 page 2010 Weekend Trips Slideshow(s) covering (at least) 53 destinations, and (almost) all of them from trips that actually took place on actual weekends. Now (thankfully) I no longer am constantly exhausted from work travel and my level of travel has calmed down to something that closer resembles that of a normal person. Although for this page of this slideshow, we’ll kind of do a bit of a throwback and actually travel around a bit, starting here in Providence, Rhode Island.
If you don’t count sitting on an Amtrak train and riding right through, this is the second consecutive year that I visited Providence. Last year I was there as part of an epic roadtrip that took me up to Newport with a stopover in Providence to see WaterFire, a sporadically scheduled festival where they (intentionally) set parts of the river on fire. WaterFire was awesome but I happened to see it during a miserable cold and windy rainstorm, one that made being outside exceptionally unpleasant. This year I decided to right that wrong by giving Providence a second chance and adding an overnight stay on my way home from Boston and the AIA Conference. With no rain, I spent my time walking around its hilly but manageable downtown and seeing (some) of the things I hoped to see last year,
Besides hiding in the (excellent) RISD Museum and hiding in the (acceptable) Providence mall to wait out the start of WaterFire last year, I had really hoped to walk up the hill and spend some time at Brown University, a wrong that was easily righted this time around. The campus was pleasant, I liked it better than Harvard (sorry, Harvard) but its hard to impossible to beat Yale or Princeton when you’re ranking Ivy League campuses.
Right past the Amtrak Station on top of the hill is the Rhode Island Statehouse, one of three out of state statehouses that I visited for the first time this year (still haven’t made it to the one right here in New Jersey, something I should really get around to at some point). This one was designed ny McKim, Mead and White and was impressive as you might expect it would be.
Like most state capitol buildings that I have been to, the interior was free to visit and (after clearing security) open to wander about, at least on a weekday. And also like most state capitol buildings that I have been to, its interior was pretty damn impressive.
Over Labor Day weekend, I went out to Pittsburgh (you can read all about that one in a separate slideshow) but could not figure out how to successfully avoid driving. The Amtrak trip looked interesting but was too long and hard to schedule and flights started getting more expensive than I expected them to be, meaning that my best course of action was driving, something I was really not looking forward to. I have driven I-80 West across Pennsylvania many times, on my way to places like Cedar Point or the Indy 500 or (on more than one occasion) all the way out to the west coast. And each time the worst part of all of those drives was in Pennsylvania, a seemingly endless two lane stretch with nothing going on other than slow trucks blocking you as they try to pass an even slower truck. This time was a little better though because I finally found an interesting place to stop at about halfway through the drive.
This is the Palmer Art Museum on the Penn State University Campus, a nice new building designed by Allied Works that is located in a nice arboretum with a nice art collection inside that is free to visit. A nice stopover (that was coupled with a stop at Berkey Creamery for some lunchtime ice cream) that made that horrible drive across Pennsylvania a lot more, well, nice.
On my way back from Pittsburgh I stayed overnight at Harrisburg (also included in the Pittsburgh slideshow) and then made one last stop at Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, an especially scenic small town that (for me at least) always seems really hard to get to and really hard to visit. Even on the day after Labor Day, the parking was difficult and the town packed.
The reason I stopped at Jim Thorpe wasn’t just to take pictures of the (small) town but also to ride its scenic railroad through the Lehigh Gorge. I bought my ticket the night before and was lucky to get one, the train was sold out the next day. I read what I could online and made sure to line up way too early and sit on the side of the train car with better views although, if I’m being honest, a lot of the views of the gorge weren’t all that great. There were so many trees blocking the river that you kind of wished it was late Fall, even though Fall is probably the very worst time to even think about making the (for me at least) always unnecessarily hard trip to Jim Thorpe.
If this page has a theme (and I already said that it does) it would be actual weekend trips with overnight stays, even though (of course) most of them took place on weekdays. This last stop (which was actually on a weekend) doesn’t really qualify in that sense, even though it feels when you’re there (to me at least) like you traveled much farther than Exit 8 on the New Jersey Turnpike.
This is BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey, not only the largest Hindu temple in Robbinsville (a pretty low bar to clear) but also the largest in the Western Hemisphere (a somewhat higher bar to clear). The complex is exquisitely built and adorned with an almost unimaginable amount of hand carved stone, which looked even better under a perfect blue summer sky. They don’t allow photos on the inside which (honestly) is probably a good thing, otherwise you would probably find yourself looking at another six or ten or twelve photos with me trying to describe something that (in all honesty) I’ll probably never really quite understand.
