from the desk of stinkpot

i thought i’d share some of the photos i took during our camping trip last weekend to rhode island.

we spent two days at east beach – easily the best beach i’ve ever been to in new england. the water was warm (a balmy 65 degrees) and the beach was uncrowded (as you can see in the picture above). christina’s inner island person loved east beach.

we made camp about 15 bike-minutes away from the beach in a surprisingly bucolic national (state?) park. due to all that family guy i’ve watched, i had expected most of rhode island to look like quahog.

lucky for us, we had ensconced right by a delightful little observatory run by amateur astronomers. even luckier: we arrived the one night of the week that the telescope was open to the public. and luckiest: we had a night sky so cloud-free that we could easily pick out the milky way. one might say our lucky stars aligned that night. (heh)

in any case, we were treated to a great outdoor lecture on how to pick out stars and constellations (i finally learned how to find the north star) by an endearingly curmudgeonly old man, who at various points in his talk, scolded both a 5-year old girl and a young man with down syndrome.

who knew there was so much to do in rural rhode island? later that night, after we stopped at the observatory, we made our way to the county fair. there, we had the good fortune to see all manner of ribboned livestock and shady carnival games. my favorite part of the fair though, was easily the tractor pull (above). it seems that a sizable population of rhode island folk supercharge their riding lawnmowers and enter them into load-pulling competitions. (oddly enough, there didn’t appear to be any events where the lawnmowers were actually tasked with mowing grass.)

midway through one of the tractor pulls, i found myself lost in one of those moments where you realize that the world (or you) is ridiculous. here we were on a friday night, under blazing spotlights firing down on a humongous sandbox, the only non-whites in a crowd of perhaps a thousand (meaning we were constantly being stared at), cheering on men in track suits riding screaming lawnmowers. what the hell were we doing there? it was really surreal.
tragically, it turns out that we missed the dung throwing contest, which took place the next day.

when in rhode island and not on the beach, staring at the sky, or at the fair, we occupied ourselves with burning things. i don’t know why, but i love smelling like a fire. christina too. it must be some primal thing; you figure that mankind built fires daily for 2000 or so generations (50,000 years/25 years per generation – that’s almost certainly wrong). at most, we stopped making big fires (gas stoves don’t count) 10 generations ago. being a pyromaniac is completely reasonable.

besides, all that dim firelight gives me great opportunities for justifying my SLR/high-aperture lens habit. i’ve started a war on flash photography, quencher of natural light.
and, most importantly, campfires enable the best part about camping:

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