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After Six Flags one day, the US Open the next, and a busy day of tennis already, we decided we needed some more time on our feet. So, we took the girls on the Newport Cliff Walk, a long walk along the cliffs between huge mansions and Easton Bay.

We took lots of breaks.

And saw lots of great views.

Part way along the cliff walk, there was a way to walk out onto the rocks, which the girls were excited about.

While one side of the cliff walk looks out over the cliffs, the other side has lots of Gilded Age mansions. These places are huge and very cool to look at. Today, they mostly serve different purposes (museums, etc.). Seven of these estates were actually combined together to form Salve Regina University, which is what you see in the background of the picture here.

After about 1.5 miles, we decided we’d walked enough. None of us wanted to walk back, so we waited on the bus.

After some dinner at a pizza joint (Nikolas Pizza, which was exactly what we wanted), we walked a little bit more for a sweet treat. Sticks and Cones has fresh made gelato, soft serve ice cream, fancy cones (Molly has a chocolate chip cookie cone), and waffles on a stick. It was great!

While the girls may have been more modest in their treats, I went all out with a hot waffle ice cream sandwich. I also went for one of their more unique flavors - sweet corn gelato. They put this in between two fresh waffles, drizzled on some caramel sauce, sprinkled on some powdered sugar, and it was amazing.

We then finally walked back to our car and drove back to our hotel in Massachusetts, exhausted after a great day.

Day 3 of our road trip took us to the real impetus for the trip - the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ve wanted to visit here for years.

I’ll give you a little history so you understand the place. As many of you may know, Newport became the place many wealthy families spent their summers during the Gilded Age (late 19th and early 20th century). That’s why there are so many huge mansions in Newport. Of course, wealthy people had the time and money to engage in lots of activities, so there were a bunch social clubs. One of those was the Newport Casino, which had lots of activities including lawn tennis. Since all the rich folks were there in the summer, this became the site of the first United States Lawn Tennis Association championships. This tournament grew, eventually moved to New York, and then later became what is now the US Open.

The place fell into disrepair, but was eventually restored. Today, it has a museum as well as a fully functioning tennis club with outdoor grass courts as well as indoor courts. Every year it hosts a professional tournament and inducts new legends into the Hall of Fame.

I really wanted to play on the grass courts. I’d never played on grass before, so I booked a court for Leah and me a few weeks in advance. It was expensive ($120 for an hour), but totally worth it. Because we were playing, we were allowed to park in the private club parking lot for free (all the parking around there is paid). We stopped by the club house to get a discount coupon for the museum (another perk of playing), then headed to the museum. They had a green screen photo booth, which we had fun with while waiting for our tour to start.

Here are some more videos and pictures from the photo booth, if you’re interested.

We then took a very interesting guided tour of the museum. We learned about many of the Hall of Fame inductees and the history of tennis. One of my favorite parts was about early racquet sports as well as Court Tennis. Court Tennis, also called Real Tennis or Royal Tennis, is an old more complicated version of the game. More on that later.

One of the fun features of the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum is this broadcasting booth. It lets you record yourself doing commentary on a famous tennis match, then plays it back for you.

We ate lunch across the street from the Hall of Fame at the Newport Creamery. Leah was excited they had a Waffled Grilled Cheese, and both girls were excited to try an Awful Awful.

After lunch, it was finally time to play tennis on the grass courts. We of course had to wear our tennis whites to be allowed to play.

Leah and I did some serving practice side by side. If you’re wondering why she’s inside the line, it’s because she currently plays orange ball tennis, which has a shorter court.

Not sure what’s going on with Leah’s serve technique here, but it cracked Jen up for hours.

This summer, Leah’s school is doing a thing where they encourage kids to take pictures of themselves reading with the Wildcat in interesting locations. After we finished playing, Leah read a bit and got a picture.

There are lots more pictures of our grass court tennis on Flickr, if you’re looking for even more. Playing on grass is very different from hard or clay courts. The ball bounces so low, and there are so many odd bounces. It’s very challenging.

After playing, we explored the grounds a bit more. Not only did we learn about Court Tennis in the museum, they even had a fully functioning court that people still play on. This sport is largely unchanged from the days of King Henry VIII (who apparently played all the time). Sadly, no one was playing while we were there.

We bought some souvenirs, then finally left the Hall of Fame. But our day in Newport was only half over. I’ll tell you about the rest of our day in the next post.

Day 2 of our road trip took us to the US Open. Last year, I had gotten a great deal on tickets by waiting till the last minute. This year did not go as well. We left our hotel in New Jersey Thursday morning without any tickets. I kept checking when we stopped, but eventually gave up and bought some tickets at the rest stop right before crossing the George Washington Bridge. No deals for us, this year.

We also had trouble getting there, as there was traffic and Molly eventually got car sick. We finally got in the gates about noon, grabbed some quick lunch, then hit the courts. First stop - Armstrong Stadium where Naomi Osaka (world #1 and reigning champion) was about to come out.

While we did not get to see one of our favorite players, Bethany Mattek-Sands, play tennis, she was with us in Armstrong Stadium in the broadcaster booth.

Osaka was playing Magda Linette, who I had hopes of putting up a good fight to make it a competitive match since Linette had won the lead-up tournament in the Bronx the week before. This was not the case, though, as Osaka played great and won fairly easily.

One of my favorite parts of the US Open is the outer courts, where you can sit or stand right next to the court. It’s so up close and personal. We had limited time, so I didn’t get to do this as much as I would have liked, but I did manage to go see a player I really wanted to see. Bianca Andreescu is a super talented teenager, and I got to see her playing her second round match against veteran Kirsten Flipkens. It was a lot of fun. Little did I know she’d go on to defeat Serena Williams in the final and win the whole tournament.

Gotta get a picture with a giant racquet.

And the tennis ball couch was back.

Our purchased seats were in the giant Arthur Ashe stadium, but we didn’t get there till the end of our day as we enjoyed going all over the grounds earlier. We saw unseeded American Taylor Townsend take on #4 Simona Halep. It looked like Halep was going to roll over Townsend, but Townsend managed to come back and win. Sadly, we did not stay for the entire match. We had a long drive to Massachusetts that night, so opted to take off early and beat the traffic.

We ate some dinner and hit the road, driving from New York to our hotel in Attleboro, Massachusetts. We were all ready to get some sleep after a long, fun day.

For years, I’ve been saying that I wanted to take a trip up to the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island for my 40th birthday. This expanded into a slightly larger road trip over time. My birthday was back in May, but the last week of summer was the best time for this trip (as you’ll see).

It was a whirlwind trip that’ll take me several posts to detail. The schedule was:

1. Wednesday - Drive to Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey, do the park, stay in a hotel nearby.
2. Thursday - Drive to New York, go to the US Open (which is why this trip had to be the last week of summer), drive to Massachusetts, stay in a hotel there.
3. Friday - Drive to Newport, Rhode Island, go the the tennis hall of fame, enjoy Newport, drive back to the hotel in Massachusetts.
4. Saturday - Drive into Boston, explore Boston, stay in same hotel.
5. Sunday - Drive back home.

When I planned the trip, I was thinking Six Flags would be tacked on the end as a sort of gift to the kids since they were coming along for so much of my stuff. But then scheduling made it smarter to go at the beginning. So, they got their treat at the start (though they enjoyed all the other parts as well).

Wednesday was a great day to go to Six Flags Great Adventure, as most of the schools around there were already back in session. So, the park was really empty and we rarely had to wait long for rides. I don’t have many pictures because I was generally on all the rides, but here’s a couple from rides that the girls rode along.

This park had tons of rides. We didn’t ride the most extreme of them (like Kingda Ka), but we had plenty of fun thrill rides anyway. My favorite was El Toro as I love wooden roller coasters and it’s one of the biggest around.

Six Flags Great Adventure was only the beginning of our adventure. But more on that in the next post.

3 years ago, Jen and I went to see Pentatonix in concert. When we saw that they were coming back to Merriweather, we decided to take the girls for their first big concert. This time rather than getting seats, we decided to try lawn tickets (which were great!).

Leah’s friend Anna (and her mom and sister, unpictured) came too.

The crowd at Merriweather was light, which was great as we got a spot up at the front of the lawn.

Rachel Platten opened, and did a great job.

Then we had a bit of a break before Pentatonix came out.

They did a chill encore song.

It was a great concert, and everyone enjoyed it a lot. It’s amazing what these folks can do with their voices alone.

After a week of orchestra camp, Molly had a bit more performing to do. She joined me and the band to lead worship Sunday morning. This was her first time playing viola with the praise band.

Molly was selected to attend the Junior Summer Strings Institute put on by the National Philharmonic this year. This is a week long summer camp put on by folks from the National Philharmonic (who play at the Strathmore in Bethesda). Last year, Molly was in the Prep Institute (for 4th-6th graders), but this year she moved up to the Junior Institute (for 6th-10th graders). They only take really advanced students, so Molly was excited to be selected.

She had a great week working on lots of skills and some really challenging music. They put on two concerts at the end of the week for families to attend. Thanks to Grams and Aunt Caroline for joining us. Here's Molly with her Chamber Ensemble performing in the afternoon.

The evening concert was the full orchestra concert. Molly it very seriously, as you can see from her sticking out her tongue at me.

And here’s the full evening concert.

Here’s Molly and her entourage after the second concert (Aunt Caroline was unable to stay for the second concert, and we failed to get a picture at the first).

After the concert, we went to The Baked Bear for ice cream sandwiches. This place lets you choose two fresh baked cookies or brownies (fresh like still on the cookie sheet) and an ice cream flavor to make you a delicious ice cream sandwich. It’s as good as it sounds. I cannot understand why these places aren’t everywhere. These places should be as plentiful as fro-yo.

Both of our girls have enjoyed having long hair for some time. Jen would suggest they cut it, and both would vehemently refuse. Towards the end of last school year, that changed for Leah. She started talking about cutting her hair, and she wanted it to be long enough to donate. In August she finally reached that goal and Jen made an appointment with her stylist, Crystal.

Here’s what Leah’s hair looked like before heading to the hair salon.

Her hair, prepped for donation.

Leah was all smiles while Crystal did her thing.

Leah had 10 inches cut and donated to Locks of Love. We all love her new ‘do!

Thanks Crystal!

Jen also got her hair cut and as they finished up, a huge thunder storm rolled in. Crystal offered them shower caps to protect their fresh hair cuts from getting soaked.

And here’s Leah’s hair after her trip to the salon.

While Chad and Molly were off on their NYC adventure, Leah and I took a few of her friends to Six Flags America.

Rides are more fun when you are getting squished by your friends!

No surprise, Roar was the favorite coaster of the day!

The girls decided to have a mid-afternoon treat together. We did get more than one, but this one was definitely snacked on by everyone.

It was the first visit for both of Leah's friends, and everyone declared it a GREAT day!

Back in August, Molly and I had a glorious adventure to New York together. You may remember that we (her parents and grandparents) commemorated Molly’s huge achievement of earning her black belt by giving her a trip to New York to see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway. In August, that trip finally happened.

For transportation, we planned to take the train up to New York. We arrived at the train station early to make sure we didn’t miss our train, only to discover that our train was running late. We were supposed to arrive in New York at noon, drop our suitcase at our hotel, then be at the theater at 1:00 for the show at 2:00 (the show said we should get there an hour early as security lines could be long). As we waited, the train kept getting later and later. I called Amtrak to try to move to a different train and was about to change our tickets when we got word that our train had finally left the station in Washington. The train was about an hour late, but we finally got on and had no further delays.

Once we got to New York, we had almost no time. The good news was that our hotel (Row NYC) was right around the corner from the theater. The bad news was our hotel was 12 blocks uptown from Penn Station. I conferred with one of my New York coworkers, and came to the decision that it would be safer to walk it rather than risk further delay on the subway. So, Molly and I walked as fast as we could up 8th Avenue. I was very impressed at how well Molly did navigating New York crowds, weaving in and out of folks as we hoofed it to the hotel. Once there, we checked in, went to our room, Molly changed from her sneakers to fancy shoes, and we were back out of the hotel in just a couple of minutes. We made it to the theater without any trouble (getting there an hour early was unnecessary) and finally took a deep breath. We stopped by concessions to get a drink (we were both very parched after all that), and settled in to our seats.

Our view:

For those unfamiliar, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is a very long play. It’s got two parts, and you buy tickets for both parts. The first part was from 2:00 to 5:00, then we got a dinner break until the second part started at 7:30.

We planned to go to Ellen’s Stardust Diner for dinner, but the line was a full block long. After waiting in it for 15 minutes, we knew we didn’t have time to wait for it. So, we went in search of somewhere else to eat. We ended up at Pasta Lovers, which was actually fairly empty. The pizza and service there was great! Would recommend.

Our dinner went so quickly, we stopped into the Times Square Disney Store to check it out before heading back to the theater.

I won’t spoil the play for you, but it was fantastic! We loved it so much. Best show either of us have ever seen! I actually went into it a bit trepidatious, as a serious Potterhead worried they’d mess it up. That didn’t last long. And Molly was so into it. It was a lot of fun, and was a take on the Potter universe in a very different way from the books and movies. And the effects were just amazing. All the wire work, and the many creative magic tricks. It was just so good.

The experience was even more than the show itself. The carpet throughout the entire building was Hogwarts themed. They had Harry Potter snacks and souvenir cups. They even had house banners for people to take pictures with, and a staff person standing there all day to take pictures with your phone for you.

Outside the theater, they have a scene from the Sorting Hat ceremony on the wall, including a spot for you to stand like you’re being sorted. Molly tried it out after the show was over.

After the play, it was late but Molly really wanted to get a sweet treat. So, we trekked all the way to Black Tap to get one of their Crazy Shakes. This is the Cookie Shake, which is an Oreo Shake with vanilla frosted rim with cookie crumbles topped with a ‘cookiewich,’ crumbled cookies, chocolate chips, whipped cream & chocolate drizzle. Way over the top, but so good!

We finally got back to our hotel room around midnight and crashed. We got up early the next morning, checked out, and walked toward Penn Station for our train home. We stopped into Liberty Bagels Midtown for breakfast. Molly went for the rainbow bagel with birthday cake cream cheese. She only managed to eat 1/4 of it (then 1/4 more later on the train, then 1/4 more the next day for breakfast). I had the egg bagel with dill & herb cream cheese, which was excellent.

It was such a great trip!