“You know, if you had picked a smaller state — like Rhode Island — you could be done with your project.” Lisa and I were talking about my Commonwealth project, which was winding up its second year. “I bet you could do that in a solid week of work.”

A week? How about a day!

On Labor Day, we visited thirty-eight of the thirty-nine cities and towns in the state of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The 39th, Block Island (New Shoreham) — being an island out in the Atlantic reachable only by boat or plane — didn’t fit into the plans that I drew up the night before, so we conveniently deferred it for another day.

Lisa, who doesn’t really enjoy driving, followed the somewhat circuitous route around the western towns near Connecticut over toward Providence, south to Block Island Sound, over the Newport Bridge to Rhode Island proper, down and up the eastern towns, northand and westward through Bristol County and Providence and the hood, and finally home again after leaving the nation’s smallest state via Woonsocket. I stuck my head out the window, making black-and-white snapshots of anything and everything along the way.

I won’t insult Rhode Island by claiming to know what it’s like. But from the first time that I went to RI, I’ve known that it feels a bit different than its neighbors. Lisa, who works at Brown University in Providence, tells stories about its quirkiness and charm. Rhode Island is a lovely place where residents venerate chickens, put shrines to the Virgin in bathtubs in their front yards, and don’t like to go places on “the big road.”

In the coming days, I’ll post some images of what the state south of our small, glorious, liberal Commonwealth looks like from a moving automobile.