Famous People #76: The one where we go on a boat
Lizzie: Longtime Famous People readers will be familiar with our proprietary but not yet copyrighted concept of “fall trip,” or the period of time in fall-ish when we pick a town in the state of New York and go there, so long as our Airbnb host doesn’t cancel on us. Past hits in the series include: “Weekend at Ruby’s,” “The gold rush,” and “Saturday sleepover at Jen’s Haunted House.”
This year we went to Kingston, NY near where Luanne used to have a house, but she sold it because everyone hated it. According to Ramona a few seasons ago, “Kingston has not arrived,” but fall trip isn’t about going to places that have arrived — it’s about going to places that are haunted.
Kaitlyn: Lizzie is talking about some of the Real Housewives, which I’m not allowed to do anymore because it has become the literal only thing I say. (The “haunted” reference is to my desire to see ghosts. I found an address but we didn’t go!)
Anyway, longtime Famous People readers also understand the bit we’re working with here and don’t need it explained. But it is something like: we’re not famous. We’re simply the type of girls who would book an Airbnb “in” the Berkshires, and then while one of us is driving a rental car through the Central Valley of California on a “work trip” she gets a text from the Airbnb host Susan that says we aren’t going to be able to stay in her house anymore because of a personal problem that honestly did sound bad. We don’t at all consider ourselves victims of deceit or anything like that in this situation. Airbnb refunded us immediately and left a nice apologetic voicemail, not that any of this means that the company Airbnb shouldn’t arguably be illegal which it arguably should. Anyway, we booked a different Airbnb in Kingston, New York as Lizzie said. Then we saw on Cat Marnell’s Instagram that she’d recently been smoking Marlboro Golds at a wedding there—like Carrie Bradshaw, except in Kingston, New York. (Remember when Carrie went to Suffern, lmao??) We felt a lot better about going to Kingston, New York after I screenshotted that post and sent it to the group chat. Ashley picked us up around noon on Friday in the Honda Fit.
The drive was uneventful, and I think we mostly discussed our five-year plans! We did not, however, discuss any kind of goals for our time in Kingston.
Lizzie: When you’ve done no planning at all for a trip, you need to use the world around you as a resource, like they did in the old days. A visitor’s center? Closed, but there are brochures. A sign by the river about a boat tour? Tickets secured! A man at a local wine shop? Winery recommendations galore!
Friday night we launched off to Brunette, the kind of wine bar with patterned wallpaper and pét-nats by the glass. One glass deep, Ashley had a 50 First Dates moment where she realized that she’s actually been to Brunette before. It was the wallpaper that triggered the memory. She showed us a photo of her younger self at Brunette and we all got dizzy with the passage of time.
Kaitlyn: She’s right. I love rare photos of Ashley with bangs!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Lizzie is skipping the part where we arrived in town circa 3 PM and I said “I’m so hungry” and Ashley trolled me by saying that she was hoping to get a carwash as soon as we’d settled in. I actually still don’t know if she was joking, but we ended up just touring our Airbnb—one half of a brick building from, allegedly, 1870—and then heading into the waterfront historic district for a snack of hummus and pita and cauliflower wings. At other times in our lives, Lizzie and I might have been sharing an editor who would tell us that this chronology is confusing and that we aren’t giving the reader as much incentive to stick it out as we think…
Well, an important part of the story is that after our bar snack we went back to our Airbnb—which had a full spider-web across the entire front door, and Lizzie kept saying “spiders are friends,” as if she’d recently been hypnotized—and I changed into a sort of dramatic, boxy white button-down that I purchased for a “work trip” but hadn’t ever worn because it was pretty see-through and I was conducting professional interviews. I ironed it on an ironing board I found in the closet and was really nervous going back out to the yard to see what the girls thought. I still don’t know what they thought, but they said: “cool!” Then we set out for the aforementioned wine bar and for dinner at a trattoria that we honestly selected solely because it served espresso martinis and we are big fans of the Bravo reality program Summer House. I promise we have other interests and we talked about many of them on the trip: the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, the 2016 nonfiction book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, the contentious history of the Brooklyn-Queens expressway, a good recipe for bolognese. I swear, we care about it all. I’ll admit that none of the other interests affected our dinner plans.
Lizzie: The trattoria gave us more than we could’ve ever asked for, including a new best friend for life and enough leftover pasta to give our totally empty fridge a sense of purpose. Back at Rupert’s, we “played” a “card game” that Ashley’s boyfriend bought from a spiritual healer/Reiki practitioner in the park. It was meant to increase our intimacy levels by posing questions to the group like “What’s your biggest fear?” and “What’s one thing you could never give up?” I said dying and basically everything, respectively. And those were some of the good ones! Kaitlyn had to skip a lot of the questions because as much as we love a laugh, you can only take things so far before the group cringes into a pile of dust.
Kaitlyn: Not to confuse the chronology again, but when Lizzie says we made a new best friend, she’s referring to our trattoria waitress Teresa. She alluded to being pregnant even though it wasn’t physically obvious! I absolutely know that she’s nice to everyone. This is not a “my bodega guy” situation. We just thought she was really good at her job and that she seemed pretty happy with her life. If we ever had an opportunity to become true friends with her we would do it, politics permitting. (With a gun to my head I could not tell you the ideological lean of Kingston, New York.) Other than that, I think Lizzie pretty much summed up the night except for the part where I ordered bucatini in “Nonna’s Sunday Sauce” and the very first noodle I tried to slurp up ended up whipping around like the anaconda in the trailer for Anaconda and splattered my never-worn dramatic, boxy white button-down in about eight different places, making me look like The Disgusting Friend. At some point, also, the temporary crown covering my side-by-side root canals crumbled and fell down my throat.
Catching back up to what Lizzie was saying…and again I am sorry readability-wise... we went to bed after the intimacy-building card game that didn’t get that far with us because we are already very intimate and trusting of each other. I slept with Ashley in the room with the bigger bed and Lizzie slept alone in the worse room without air conditioning. It’s so frustrating because she’s like, the opposite of a Ramona! In the morning we agreed to get chocolate babka at a coffee shop and then pickle juice at a farmer’s market and then cider at a cidery and then lunch somewhere amazing, all before our ticketed river boat ride at 2:30 PM—there were no disputes about even the minutest of details, and as Ashley said multiple times, this is why we never fight. We will never fight and we will go on fall trips until “fall” ceases to be a recognized part of the year in New York’s climate. Anyway, the cider!
Lizzie: The Rose Hill Farms cidery was missing the camp and acoustic Killers covers of Long Island wineries of fall trips past, but it did have a few things going for it, like a lot of bees. The cidery, like many Kingston hot spots, was vaguely “college town alt”: exposed Edison bulbs, lots of wood, and bartenders with neon hair. Don’t ask me what a non-alt cidery looks like; I’ve never been.
After talking to the bartender, Ash found out that the place we had been planning to go for lunch was closed for a wedding, but she did get a recommendation for a pop-up barbecue spot in a field. My plate was 4 to 7 beautiful shades of tan and I wish we could’ve stayed in the field all day talking about the weddings of Kingston but we had a boat to catch!
Kaitlyn: I did enjoy our brisket and deviled eggs and cole slaw and potato salad and Capri-Sun lunch and I especially enjoyed Ashley driving us back to town to catch the Rip Van Winkle II river sight-seeing tour boat while I digested it. (Hudson River!) I think another funny thing that Liz didn’t mention is that the lunch spot we originally wanted to go was closed for a wedding but Ashley kept being like, why are they closed for a wedding? We aren’t divas, we just really wanted this sandwich:
As I’m sure you know, you can’t always get what you want! But if you try sometimes… you will end up on an absolutely packed three-tier river boat at least two weeks before any of the fall foliage arrives. The boat may be predominantly occupied by a Christian tour group and the tour-guide may be a pre-recorded voiceover that leaves much to the imagination about people who have died in the areas surrounding the key historic lighthouses. Also, there may be one mom of four who keeps doing that thing where she wants your seat so she sits down really close to you holding a baby that is kicking and squirming. The mom did this to Lizzie until she got up and moved out of her prime seat in the shade at the rear—stern?—of the river boat. Then, after I’d purchased myself a Shirley Temple in a paper cup at the bar—thank you very much!— and found a different prime seat in the shade, she attempted to do it to me also. I buckled in and prepared to spend the rest of the boat ride in my exact position, never even reuniting with Ashley and Lizzie who were on the other end of the boat at the time but would have to understand that I act solely and consistently on principle, but then she pulled her four-year-old blonde soccer toddler up onto the seat in between us so that his elbow was literally resting on my stomach. Unfortunately… I did say “fuck you” to this woman. I don’t think her children heard it, but if they did would it be the worst thing that ever happened to them?????
Lizzie: Landing ourselves in the middle of a Christian tour group is normally just the sort of thing we hope (dare I say, pray) for during fall trip, but in my opinion the boat was lacking a certain desired “boatiness.” A bit lumbering and sad, and very hot, temperature-wise. Docking was so slow I thought Ashley was gonna jump to shore.
Kaitlyn: Lizzie kept saying this during the boat ride and nobody knew what she was talking about until five minutes before we got to shore when there was suddenly a dramatic gust of wind. She was like, now this is a boat! I don’t know. And I don’t even need to tell you that we ended up eating our body-weight in Greek salads and fried cheese as soon as we touched dry land. We later had ice cream cones for $1.25 and I am still sort of wondering what kind of labor exploitation made that possible. On the way home, we bought a small gas station coffee for me and a six-pack of grapefruit White Claw for kicks.
Lizzie: Even though we considered watching Deep Blue Sea when we got back to Rupert’s, we ultimately agreed on something that would turn out to be much more horrifying. I can’t tell you the name of the show due to the fact that increased viewership will likely lead to societal repercussions we can’t even conceive of yet. We watched 4 episodes of the 6-episode season, and I swear if I hadn’t snapped them out of it, Ashley and Kaitlyn would’ve gone all the way to the end. All I can tell you is that the words “retro” and “apricot beige” reverberated in my head the rest of the night.
Kaitlyn: I watched the last two episodes when I got back to my apartment. : ( Lizzie was right not to continue, but I hope I can offer her some reassurance about the health of the show’s stars—they did eventually put something into their bodies other than chilled rosé, by each having a couple bites of a lobster roll and a salad they declared “weird” in the penultimate episode. In the finale, they thanked a construction crew that had worked for them for months and months during a pandemic with some pizza and beer; the construction crew gave them an extremely expensive and thoughtful gift that you could tell the girls didn’t think quite fit the aesthetic. As soon as I finished watching this show, alone in my apartment, I ate my leftover bucatini and drank half of a bottle of pinot noir and put denture cement over the gaping hole where my temporary crown used to be.
For whatever reason, this reminds me that Lizzie keeps promising to make t-shirts with the lady from Misery on them, with the text “They hate to see a girl boss winning.”