14 Apr 09

Steve has been tasked with writing todays blog entry as he is well and truly in the doghouse, more details will follow...

Today officially started at about 01:20pm due to a rather awful start to the day. We woke up as normal at about 10am and packed up all our stuff and made our way to Mystic where we had planned to have brunch. Upon arrival, S got out of the car, patted his waist and realised that he was missing a rather vital piece of equipment. His money belt. This contained his passport, driving license, debit card and $200 and was still sitting underneath his pillow in the motel room in Hartford, about 1 hour 20mins away.

We jumped back in the car and immediately made out way back the way we came to the motel, where without even asking, the manager passed me the money belt (phew!) minus the $200 (doh!). Unfortunately as we had no way of proving that the money was ever in the belt we had no real case to take to the police, and all the other contents were intact. So a rather sheepish S and a rather angry M made our way (at 1:20pm), via a slightly faster route, back to Mystic with money belt firmly attached to S's waist.

When we finally arrived back at Mystic, we made our way to the the Pizzaria made famous by the film "Mystic Pizza" (well, S had heard of it anyway!), the movie that made Julia Roberts famous. It should be noted at this point that we are making a mental list of the best "meat feast" type pizzas we've had on our trip, hence the reason that we shared a "meatza pizza" (for comparison reasons :) ) and a moussaka pizza. Both of which were excellent, and definitely deserve the reputation gained since the film was released in the late eighties. For those interested in our top 5 meat pizzas, we will compile the list at the end of the holiday.

By the time we had eaten and made our way back to the car it was 4:30pm and so was time to move on to our resting place for the evening. It was a rather ambitious goal even before the mishap earlier in the day so we needed to push on. We took the coastal route into Rhode Island (the USA's smallest state) and took the scenic route through some islands in the bay below Providence RI over some breathtakingly large bridges and passed rather quickly out of Rhode Island and back into Massachusetts and onto the peninsula of Cape Cod. We had planned our route to stay in a motel of the same chain as last night, so we drove about half way along the peninsula to the very very touristy town of West Yarmouth and checked in.

After a short refreshment break we realised that it was rapidly approaching 8pm and so we set out walking along the main road (surrounded by motels and holiday resorts) and came across a rather nice looking restaurant that appeared to be one of the only ones open! S had a chicken soup followed by roast duck in an orange sauce, M had the same soup with a sea food pasta dish. Both were very nice, but the puddings took the biscuit!! S had a chocolate fudge brownie which was hot, very sticky and wonderfully chocolatey and M had a New York cheesecake with strawberries which was rich and delicious! Feeling rather full we embarked on the 30min walk back to the motel where we are sat blogging and reading.