We arrived in Newport on Friday morning of Labor Day weekend, with plans for my brother Matthew to meet us Saturday evening and stay for a week. As per Matthew's usual curse, a few days earlier, our convection microwave/oven had decided to spontaneously perish, and we were having a hell of a time finding a replacement less than 2 weeks away. David eventually managed to find an appliance store a few towns over with one in their warehouse that they could get in stock on Friday, so the first stop after arriving was taking an Uber out to pick up the new microwave, since David had the day off work.

David has been wanting to re-organize the back lazarette storage for a while, so on Saturday morning we took a trip to Home Depot to pick up some new storage crates. As with any organization project, everything is always much messier before it is clean again!

After some flight delays and last minute plane changes, Matthew finally arrived around midnight. The next day, I cooked a full English breakfast on the boat, and then we set off to do the mansion cliff walk. When David and I were here last time, we just walked along the cliffs, but didn't go into any of the open-to-the-public mansions. This time, we decided to visit the Breakers, which is supposed to be the grandest of all of them. This was the summer "cottage" for the Rockefeller family. I was expecting it to be extremely garish in it's luxuriousness, but it was actually incredibly tastefully beautiful. Each room's theme was carefully thought out and exquisitely executed.

When we returned to the boat, our original plan was to visit a brewery before our dinner reservations, but it turned out we didn't really have enough time, so we decided to open a bottle of champagne on the boat instead. David did take a photo of this, but it is so bad that I cannot publish it!

With it being Sunday night of Labor Day weekend, I had had a hard time finding any dinner reservations for a party of 3. We ended up with reservations at the Dining Room in the Vanderbilt. We had a fabulous table in the corner and we had an absolutely fantastic meal there.

The next morning, we left Newport and headed for Block Island where we would be meeting up with John and Joan on their new boat Tryst (their first ever power boat!). Block Island is a very popular Labor Day spot, but most people leave the island on Monday, and as we were approaching the island, people were indeed leaving in droves. As a result, the harbor was relatively empty when we arrived and we had no problem finding a mooring. However, as soon as we were set up, we discovered from the harbormaster that we were actually on one that was too small for our boat and we were instructed to move. Matthew hopped on the dinghy while we located the right mooring!

We headed to land for lunch at "The Oar" with John and Joan, after which we walked around to the main town where Joan had recommended that we get a taxi to give us a tour of the island. Near the ferry terminal we found a taxi driver who agreed to take us around. We learned a lot about the island, including how they had moved the lighthouse (necessary due to cliff erosion). We were able to get out at the cliffs and take in the amazing view.

The taxi driver dropped us off at the dinghy dock and we did a quick stop to take a tour of Tryst before heading back to Highwind. For the evening, David had found a ghost tour of the island called "Spirits with Spirits" that was essentially a pub crawl with ghost stories. John and Joan joined us, so we went for an early dinner first, and then did the tour, which was fun!

We had only planned to stay at Block Island for the one day as we wanted to get to New York for the following weekend and it looked like there was some bad weather coming in, so on Tuesday morning, we left early and did a long ride to Port Jefferson. We had a bit of a bumpy ride leaving Block Island, and apparently went through an incredibly large standing wave in The Gut where we nose dived a rush of water over the bow. I missed all this as I was downstairs on a call (rolling all over the place in my office chair!). Once we turned the corner, the water had some protection from the wind by the tip of the island and the remainder of our ride was calm. However, the weather was pretty gloomy and it rained all evening, so we stayed on the boat for the night.

The next day, the weather cleared a bit, so after I finished working, Matthew and I headed into town and hung out at a brewery while we waited for David to finish his work day. We then met up with Russ and Jax for an amazing Indian dinner at a local restaurant.

The next day we cruised to Port Washington where we again did not get off the boat due to rain and bad weather, though Jax sent me a lovely picture of Highwind at sunset.

Luckily good weather was forecasted for the weekend and I had planned to take Friday off so that I could spend a long weekend in the city with Matthew, so on Friday morning, we left Port Washington and headed towards New York!