Trip to New England: Sailing Festival

While my family and I were on a vacation in Rhode Island, we went to the Herreshoff Marine Museum and America’s Cup Hall of Fame. They were having a sailing festival. Because we sail in California, this was a good opportunity for us.

More on this picture later.

They had a lot of boats that anyone could try. When we arrived, there were two boats left. One of them was my sister’s favorite boat called the RS Tera. I sailed a boat I had never sailed before. It was the RS Neo. The wind in Narragansett Bay is stronger than where I usually sail. I didn’t capsize. (Yet)

After that, I took out the blue boat that you see above. It is called a UFO. There are two versions of the UFO. The blue sail one can’t foil (fly). Somehow, in a boat without walls, I stayed really dry. I took out the green sail UFO later. It can foil. More on that later.

After that, I took out the RS Quest.

It is a two-person boat. When I was sailing it, the winds were strong because it was a fast boat, so I had to constantly lean over the edge to keep it flat. I only sailed it for 20 minutes. I did the smaller sail in the front. It’s called the jib.

I was about to go because the foiling UFO was not coming back. The person he was showing it to didn’t want to go back in. The guy ended up ordering a lot of UFOs, though. He came back just in time for me to go on.

Yes, I know this looks like any other picture of someone sailing that you could see anywhere.

It was intense. And I got wet. But it was fun. Because of the large sail in relation to the size of the boat and my weight, it went really fast. But that meant I couldn’t foil without capsizing. Here is a video. That was one of the two times I capsized. I also fell out of the boat once. It was easy because there were no walls. Even though I capsized twice, it was still fun.

The whole day was fun, too.

A couple days later, we visited some of the places where sailboats are made.

We went to Zim Sailing. They make C420s, CFJs, and Optimists. They are also one of the few American distributors for RS Sailing. It was cool to see the boats being made. You could see the wood infrastructure of some of them.

Next, we went to Fulcrum Speedworks. They make the UFO that I talked about earlier. There is a small facility that makes all the UFOs in the world. Their office is literally just the laptop computers of the people who work there because they are an innovative startup that just focuses on making boats to keep up with the demand.

Both days were fun. And all of it was in a small town in Rhode Island.

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Trip To New England: JFK Library

Trip to New England: Herreshoff Marine Museum and America’s Cup Hall of Fame

Trip To New England: JFK Library

On our second day in New England, we went to the JFK Library in Boston. At the time, my family was reading a book about the Berlin Wall. Unlike the Nixon and Reagan Libraries, it only showed the good things during his presidency. He attacked the Bay of Pigs while he was president. It is a bay in Cuba. The attack went horrible and they lost terribly. It only mentioned the attack in one sentence.

They had two movies that we watched. The movies were about his life until he got nominated to be president and the  Cuban Missile Crisis. There was one giant room that looked like this:

Because of the shape of the metal on the walls, I think I could climb it.

After that, we went to the Subway. In Boston, it is called the T.

We could each choose a stop. I couldn’t really think of one but that worked out because everyone was really tired even without my stop. My sister, Kate, just chose a random stop at a park. My mom chose to go to Harvard.

The statue in the background is John Harvard.

Her stop took a while because we rested, explored, and played. (I know that sounded like an ad.)

My dad stopped at Copley Square. We went to the mall but first we went to the Fairmont Hotel. They had a dog house for the greeter dogs. Finally, we went to the mall. It was 7 stories tall. That is bigger than I thought it would be but I have to judge by malls in Orange County. They are small. The largest one I can think of is 2 stories tall.

We got back to the hotel late that night because we had to drive from Boston to Warwick, Rhode Island. Part of the reason is that we stopped at 99. The kids eat free if the Red Sox win. That works out because the Red Sox are a good team. We went to sleep at 11:00 because we only adjusted to EST at the end of our vacation. That day was fun but tiring.

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Trip to New England: Herreshoff Marine Museum and America’s Cup Hall of Fame