The last time I visited Providence was for my 5-year college reunion 6 years ago (which I wrote about here and here). Last year, Michael and I planned to go for my 10-year college reunion. I was so excited to be back and share all my memories with him, but for several reasons (a covid surge, my mom’s surgery schedule, my Europe trip…), we ended up having to cancel. This visit felt long overdue.
If you know me personally, you know the meaning that Providence holds for me. I lived there for my four years of college—the longest I’ve lived anywhere as an adult other than New Orleans. It was the first time I ever lived in a city and the first time I ever lived outside of the deep south. Providence was the first place I ever visited above the Mason Dixon line (when my parents and I visited colleges the summer before senior year). Before I lived there, Brown University, and Providence by proxy, meant unspeakable wonder and unattainable dreams. And then suddenly they became attainable, and I spent my four years there incessantly wandering every inch of the city until it felt like it belonged to me. I think it will always feel like a version of home. Everything about my time in college was transformative, and it’s impossible for me to separate my time at Brown from Providence itself. (If you’re in the mood for some more of my sappy love stories about Providence, here’s one I wrote almost a decade ago that still feels true.)
My love for Providence is too nuanced and specific for me to be sure that it translates well into travel recommendations that would be relevant to others. The allure of the city for a person looking for a New England getaway weekend is vastly different than it is for a person who holds this place on the highest of nostalgic pedestals. I wasn’t sure what Michael would think or how my own nostalgia would paint his image of the place.
But college towns and cities change quickly. Last time I visited, many of the stores and restaurants I’d loved in college were gone and replaced with new ones. And I knew that now, six years and a pandemic later, many more would be gone. It was important to me to visit Providence as the city it is today and not just as a receptacle of my memories. I wanted to revisit places I loved but discover new ones to love, too.
On our first morning, I took Michael to Federal Hill—the Italian neighborhood full of markets and restaurants. It looks exactly the same as it did 15 years ago. I like that some places can be so reliable. We wandered through downtown, which looks the liveliest I’ve ever seen it, and up College Hill, and I gave Michael a tour of Brown’s campus—still one of my favorite places. Michael is largely ambivalent about his own college years, and he said that seeing Brown and hearing my memories felt more nostalgic for him than seeing his own university does now. This year’s graduation/reunion weekend was still a couple of weekends away, so campus was calm and quiet with students finishing finals. Reunion weekend is wild fun, but I’m glad that we got to explore without the crowds. We wandered Thayer Street to see what had and hadn’t changed and then walked to Wickenden Street to what is probably my favorite coffee shop of all time—The Coffee Exchange. It’s still thriving and has even opened extra seating upstairs. I spent more hours than I could ever count there, and it’s where I wrote half of my manuscript that turned into my graduate school thesis. I’ve developed a sensitivity to coffee since those days, but Michael got a coffee on my behalf that I took four celebratory sips of.
That night, we got tea and baklava at the adorable cafe Aleppo Sweets and then had dinner at the new(ish) restaurant Aguardente. The owner of Aleppo Sweets fled from Syria during the civil war, and he and his family came to Rhode Island as refugees. They hire a lot of Syrian refugees for their staff. Aguardente is a restaurant that blends culinary traditions from Portugal and Guatemala. It’s a gorgeous place with a unique menu, and the food was incredible. Both of these places opened in the last two or three years, and they help me love the current version of this city instead of just the version in my memory.
Train Rides 8 and 9: Commuter Rail from Providence to Boston (1.25 hours) and then Amtrak Downeaster from Boston to Portland (2.5 hours).
We planned at first to visit Portland from Providence as a day trip, but I’d had my eye on a hostel in Portland that I wanted to visit for years, so we decided to spend a night. To get to Portland, we took the local commuter train from Providence to Boston (which costs $12.50 OR none if the train is crowded and the ticket collector doesn’t want to bother) and then took the metro to a different train station to catch the Amtrak north. Why not just take the Amtrak the whole way from Providence? There isn’t one. Then why not at least take the commuter rail to the same station where you’ll catch the Amtrak from? Because the commuter rail doesn’t go all the way to that station. Why on Earth not? A great question—Why on Earth not, Amtrak?
We took a local bus from the train station in Portland to downtown where our hostel was. Black Elephant Hostel looks like someone got high and decided to shop online for the most festive wallpaper they could imagine. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. It’s vibrant and eclectic and as well-designed and managed as the best hostels I’ve visited in Europe. It’s been a huge shame to me for a long time that America doesn’t have a hostel culture like Europe does, but Black Elephant is thriving. Let this be the example the rest of you future-hostel-owners need. Even their book selection was wonderful. Our room, the lemur room, had lemur wallpaper on the ceiling, and what else would you ever want to look at during bouts of insomnia? The bathroom downstairs had different lemur wallpaper that I have full intentions of buying before Michael can stop me. They also have a “vampire bathroom” upstairs that you have to get a special code to access. I didn’t know this until right before we left, but do not accidentally bypass the opportunity for a bath in the vampire bathroom (complete with a wall-lantern and claw-foot tub) if you decide to stay there.
I’d been to Portland a couple times before, but both times were brief and more than 10 years ago. We wandered and found clam cakes and seafood/lobster chowder then shopped in beautiful bookstores and walked down the bike path to the park and ate delicious pizza, and the whole event felt like a very Maine-themed day.
Train Rides 10 and 11: Amtrak Downeaster from Portland to Boston (2.5 hours), and then Commuter Rail from Boston back to Providence (1.25 hours)
Back in Providence, we had dinner at Kebab and Curry, the first Indian food I ever tried over a dozen years ago. I spent the next day working and then splurging at the Brown Bookstore and Books on the Square before eating Moroccan food at the gorgeous Tea in Sahara and eating ice cream at the all-vegan Like No Udder even though it was 40-something-degrees outside. And then the next day, we took the public bus to Newport for $2. Tourist season hadn’t quite started, so Newport was very quiet. We wandered to the mansions and walked along the famous cliff-walk for a mile or so, and Michael hopped around on the boulders like a mountain goat while I tip-toed cautiously like a creature just learning to walk. Back in Providence, we ate at another new-to-me restaurant, Den Den Asiana, where I discovered the Korean dish BiBimBap for the first time and now want to eat it for every meal. I said goodbye until next time to my beloved Providence, and Michael officially declared it his favorite city of the trip.
Train Ride 12: Commuter Rail to Sharon, Massachusetts (45 minutes)
This is the part of the story where things get wild. Our original plan was to arrive back in New Orleans by May 19th. But after we started our trip, I realized Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour was going to be at Gillette Stadium just 30 miles from Providence on the night of the 19th. We’d miss it by 2 nights. I asked Michael how he’d feel about us staying the two extra days in hopes of seeing it. There was a lot of deliberation, but we decided to try.
Now to be clear, we did not actually have tickets to the concert. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 6 months, you may be unaware that tickets to this concert sold out before they were even released to the public back in November (when people like me were sitting in restaurants in Florence on the day of the pre-sale refreshing Ticketmaster 40 times to no avail). Now the only way you can get a ticket is to buy one from ticket reseller websites like StubHub, and all of the prices are over $1,000. EXCEPT on the day of an individual show when that day’s prices may or may not dip into the low hundreds. The tour isn’t coming to New Orleans or anywhere I could reach in a day, so this was the only place where it made sense for me to try for a same-day ticket. Michael, who is not exactly a Taylor Swift fan (yet—we’re working on it) reluctantly agreed to this nonsense, and we managed to book a cheap hotel with reward points that was three miles from Gillette Stadium.
The transportation situation was tricky. Gillette Stadium is in the very small town of Foxborough (population 6,000) halfway between Providence and Boston. All the train tickets directly to the stadium sold out in like 4 minutes weeks prior to this, and there was no other public transportation directly to the stadium. Grid-locked traffic was expected to start hours before the show. The local news and the stadium both discouraged people from showing up without tickets because there would be nowhere to park. Since we didn’t have a car anyway, I would not be deterred. We ended up taking the commuter rail to a little town called Sharon in Massachusetts that morning, and we waited for several hours there at an adorable café until check-in time at our hotel. We befriended some lovely local friends who were in full support of our mission, and it felt like a good omen. Then at check-in time, we took an Uber the few miles to our hotel, waited until well-after the opening acts had started when some of the traffic had thinned out, and ventured to the stadium.
And… we did not manage to get tickets. I was sad about it at first, but then a magical thing happened. Security guards outside the stadium at the mall next to it were allowing non-ticketed guests to go through security and watch from the mall-steps. They broadcast the music from the stadium so we could hear it as clearly as if we were inside, and there was a big opening into the stadium where we could see the jumbotron and part of the actual stage. Most people had been scared away by the news discouraging non-ticket holders to come, so there were only 200 or 300 of us. We had a great view considering that it was the remarkable price of free. I was delighted. It was the most joyful way to end our journey.
Train Rides 13, 14, and 15: Commuter Rail from Sharon, MA, to Providence (45 minutes), Amtrak Northeast Regional from Providence to New York City (3.5 hours), and Amtrak Crescent from New York City to New Orleans (32 hours. You read that right.)
After a dinner of midnight Dunkin Donuts’ holes, we finally made it back to our hotel room after the concert ended at 12:30am, and we had to wake up by 5am to start our 2 days of travel. The 6:30am commuter rail took us back to Providence, and we lingered in a café until time for our 9am train. The 3.5 hour trip to New York City was quick, but then it was time for the longest train ride of our entire trip—the 32 hours straight to New Orleans. I’d done the trip from New York to New Orleans once before years ago, but never after taking 2 shorter trips to lead up to it. We boarded at 2pm and settled into our new home for the next billion hours. We darted out during the 30-minute break in DC to get food we’d pre-ordered in the train station, and then back into our new home we went. We finally arrived in New Orleans around 10:00pm the next night after 41 hours (nearly consecutively) in an economy seat on a train.
And though I would not recommend you elect to take a 41-hour train ride in an economy seat, it wasn’t actually the worst. We didn’t toss each other from the moving train window. We both slept (some). We even made some new pals who were crazy enough to do the same NYC to New Orleans trip that we were doing. After 2 and ½ weeks and around 104 hours total of train travel, I still stand by my stance that train travel is my favorite way to travel.
