Well, I missed my 25th reunion but at least managed to get to Providence and Newport, RI, and Westport, MA, in the reunion year.  The girls and I enjoyed our friends' 18th-century home, digging for horseshoe crabs and shells at the beach, and I tried to figure out how to get my body to handle humidity again.

Of course, there was a bit of touring.  Chief among the highlights on the trip was the excursion to Dartmouth, Mass., and the marvels of the Christmas Tree Shops store.  Any retail establishment with a slogan (registered!)like DON'T YOU JUST LOVE A BARGAIN? is a siren call to me, of course, but this one was junk shopping paradise.  Had I not been traveling carry-on only (after the Heathrow debacle of the spring, natch), it could've been a pricey trip.  As it was, I managed to spend $33, pass a delightful hour there, and come home with dish towels, potholders, paper lanterns, cocktail napkins, potentially counterfeit foam clogs for the other trademark lawyer in the family to examine, and a charming cow-shaped bag for stashing supermarket shopping bags, all cleverly secreted in my luggage.

But what I didn't buy was so thrillingly emblematic of the store and its commitment to quality that I must share it:

                                                                                    

At only $1.99 it was so darn tempting, but I had to refrain.  The girls needed sweatshirts from Brown (yes, they now aspire to follow in Mom's footsteps there, but I keep reminding them that knowing their multiplication tables will really go far to ensuring even initial consideration) and I just had a horror of checking baggage through O'Hare.  So the photographic memory will have to suffice.

But it wasn't just shopping and wet towels.  The stroll down memory lane at Brown was thrilling (was it really that small?), and the visit to the Touro Synagogue in Newport moving, particularly George Washington's assurances to the small congregation back in 1790 that the then-infant nation would give "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."  Wise to remember that today.

Next stop: A return to Seattle!