jimsjournal

As I have been noting (complaining? whining?) lately, we seem to be very busy this summer... so not only am I having gaps between entries, I often find myself days behind and I end up just skipping stuff... But this past Friday I took a vacation day and Nancy and I wandered about on Conanicut Island.

A quick look at a poorly scetched map of part of Narragansett Bay. That's the mainland on the left (South Kingstown -- where we live) and Narragansett (which is where the Towers and Narragansett Town Beach can be found (those links were to previous entries about those places). Conanicut Island (which is almost two islands, just a narrow strip connecting the two parts) is the Township of Jamestown and is more often just called Jamestown rather than Conanicut..

We went hunting for shells along the shore at Fort Getty State Park (I marked Ft. Getty by a blob of blue on the map.) So there's Nancy hunting for shells on the rocky shore (yes, it is low tide -- we checked the tide charts before planning our trip). If you are wondering why a math teacher is looking for sea shells for her classes, Nancy is also certified in science as well as math, and she is switching to teaching science this fall.

That's the mainland on the horizon (roughly about a mile or so away). It was not a sunny day but we didn't get the rain and thunderstorms predicted for that afternoon (well, they did say 60% chance, which means a 40% chance of not raining).

Looking closely at some of the boulders, you can see some of the little critters hanging onto the rocks. (Those are living critters; we were collecting the discarded shells of some of those who may have served as dinner to some larger critter.)

This is a zoomed in and magnified shot of the Dutch Island Light -- actually it is probably almost a third of a mile away.

And here are some of the shells we collected (inside a green plastic bucket).

We went over to "downtown" Jamestown and grabbed a sandwich at an deli with a nice view of the Newport Bridge (full name: the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge -- Pell was a U.S. Senator from Rhode Island who also gave his name to the Pell Grants program). Jamestown is mostly rural (with some very nice houses) -- the commercial section of town (shops and restaurants) is on the east side of the island, about midway betwen the bridge and that red blob at the bottom of the right side of the island on my map.

The red bloob on the map is where you will find Fort Wetherill State Park -- This picture is looking generally southward along one of a pair of lovely inlets (somewhat obscured by that red blob on my map). There were some people (high school or college age I'd guess) jumping off one of those cliffs off in the distance into the water -- easily a drop of at least thirty feet.

This is the other main south-facing inlet -- the one in the previous picture is just the other side of that ridge of land. We had never been to Fort Wetherill before -- it is quite lovely. We hope to hop over again sometime in the autumn.

This shot is looking east, towards Newport (the southern part of it, that's mostly the Fort Adams area that is visible here.)

Some of the ruins of Fort Wetherill.

And here is a view of the Newport Bridge from a hill top at Fort Wetherill (somewhere around a mile and a half or two miles away).

And then, just to make our day complete, we went to the southern tip of the western chunk of Canonicut Island -- down by Beavertail Light.(which we had visted before). This is the gold blob on the map. Yes, that's Nancy waving at us from up on that rock -- the water is right behind me. This view does kind of make us think of things in their proper scale -- even more so when we look at the water... This is near the lighthouse -- if I turned to the right just enough to take Nancy out of the picture, the lighthouse would become visible.