Another way across the canal

A car ferry, docked on the delta side.

I'm not sure I would have the nerve to take a boat across the canal with all of those big ships aiming for me.

City from the ferry

Here's the city seen from the ferry, floating on its magic carpet of ice.

I celebrated the New Year by catching a cold, so I've been lazy about processing and posting pictures. I caught the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility on TV earlier in the week, and enjoyed it very much, though Hugh Grant made a most unsatisfactory Edward Ferrars -- he sidled into every scene like a child playing dress up in Mom's high heels -- and I much preferred Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon as a potential husband for the Dashwood sisters.

So I nursed my cold by drinking tea and re-reading the book, which was not such a bad way to start the year.

And ice

I was not surprised to learn that the St. Lawrence River used to freeze over every winter. Icebreakers keep it open now, because it's a critical shipping lane between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, but there's still an abundance of ice. We had a free afternoon on Christmas Eve, and I took the ferry across the river and back to see it close up. It reminded me of Antarctica.

Saturday reflections

Here's a flashback to July, and the ferry from Vancouver to Victoria.

This is why there's such a long line to get into British Columbia

A picture from the ferry yesterday. Those views made up for a lot.

Adventures, continued

And then maybe things happen for a reason. The best part of the ride to Newport was getting to know our fellow travelers.

    You live by Gramercy Park? I live two blocks from you!

    You grew up in San Francisco and moved to New York to work in publishing? Me too!

    You're from Illinois? I was born in Chicago!

    You're going to Africa? I used to live there!

These are our new friends Mary and Kent Jones, on the ferry back to Providence. Not only did Kent use the GPS on his phone to guide both the fill-in shuttle driver and the guy who drove us to Newport, when we got off the ferry and found that, big surprise, there was no shuttle waiting for us, he called an Uber.

Adventures always look better in the rear view mirror

Astute readers will have noticed that there aren't any pictures taken on the morning ferry ride from Providence to Newport. That's because there wasn't one -- or rather, there was a ferry, and it left for Newport as scheduled at 9:30 am. We just weren't on it.

There's a free shuttle that runs from several locations in downtown Providence to the ferry, and we were at the convention center stop early. Where we waited. And waited. We called the ferry company, but the customer service desk was closed for the holiday. Jayne was on hold with the main ferry office when a beat-up Providence city bus with a Not in Service sign pulled up and the driver announced that this was the super-duper emergency backup holiday shuttle. Hurray!

The only problem was that she'd never driven the route before, and she wasn't exactly sure where she was supposed to drop us off. And we had five minutes to get there. And so though we were later told that they had held the ferry as long as they could, we ran down the ramp to the landing just as it pulled away.

The next ferry wasn't for three hours, and since the ferry landing consists of a parking lot, a trailer and a Pepsi machine in basically the middle of nowhere, hanging out for three hours wasn't an attractive option. Especially since the 12:30 ferry was completely booked and there was no guarantee they'd even let us on it.

That's when one of the women selling tickets, now and forever to be known as Saint Lori of Providence, came to the rescue. She arranged for a van to pick the seven of us up and drive us to Newport, where we arrived at Perrotti Park only a couple of minutes after our ferry did.

Needless to say, those of us on the 5 o'clock ferry returning to Providence were in line by 4:30.

More pictures from the ferry

I took a ridiculous number of pictures for a weekend trip, and my first day back at work had me crawling into bed with a book shortly after dinner, so posting will be slow.

I know that these three pictures look like they were taken on three different days -- the sky's a different color in every picture -- but I spent most of my time on the ferry cleaning the salt spray from myself and my camera, and didn't pay enough attention to what I was doing.

Happy Fourth of July!

We got back late last night after what turned out to be a really fun weekend.

Here's a Providence-style tribute to the holiday: a flag dangling from a crane on the wharf, taken from the ferry coming back from Newport Sunday night.

Welcome to the working week

New York harbor at sunset. That's the Staten Island ferry (Staten Island itself is at the top right of the picture, on the western side of the Verrazano Bridge) pulling in to carry weary commuters home.