A Pilgrim’s Digression

One of Lynn’s favorite television programs is the show Ghosthunters on the Sci-Fi channel. The show just happens to be set in Warwick, Rhode Island, so when we decided we were going to vacation in New England this year, she said the one thing she wanted to see was the T.A.P.S. home office in Warwick.

After spending Saturday in Hartford, Connecticut, we decided to make Warwick our next stop today. It was only about an hour and a half drive. As we have discovered, New England is a small place, and outside of the Boston metro area, it rarely takes two hours to drive from one point to another.

When we stopped to get gas earlier, upon leving Hartford, Lynn mentioned where we were going to the gas station attendant, and he scoffed and said, “T.A.P.S. is about all you’ll see in Warwick; there isn’t anything else there.” And he was right, pretty much.

But T.A.P.S. was all we wanted to see, anyway. Lynn just wanted a picture of herself in front of the building from the opening credits of the T.V. show.

Lynn took the address from the official website: 3297 Post Road, Warwick, Rhode Island. And when we got to our hotel in Warwick, I used Google maps to find the address. At the time, we thought it a stroke of luck that our hotel was also on Post Road, but as it turned out, Warwick was designed by a team of Quaker engineers with a wicked sense of humor. Their road layout would seem to be a way of punishing the rest of us for our sins.

Post Road would end abruptly, becoming some other road, only to resume on the other end of town…but going in the opposite direction from what the Google Maps directions said we needed to go. After driving around and around on the same streets in a manner reminiscent of the Griswold family’s European vacation (”Look kids, the Warwick water tower, Dunkin’ Donuts!”), we finally figured out that Post Road was also the main street in the town, for about three or four blocks, and that this stretch was probably the location for the TV show. Certainly, it most resembled what we had seen of Warwick on the T.V. show.

But where was the building?

Having figured out where the building ought to be, we started reading building numbers.

And there it was. It had to be.

3297 Post Road.

Only, there was no T.A.P.S. sign. Indeed the building looked abandoned.

“That’s it. It has to be,” Lynn said, with certainty.

I pulled over and let her out.

“This is it,” she said. “I recognize it from the show. But there’s no sign!”

No, there was no sign on the building. It looked perfectly non-descript, like any other unoccupied office building on any other main street in small town America.

The shades were drawn. The windows were frosted. Lynn lifted the mail slot and looked in.

“Their equipment is in there! This is it!”

She put the camera to the mail slot and snapped a couple pictures.

“But why is there no sign?” She kept asking rhetorically.

The lack of identifying signage was spoiling the moment.

“Come on, let’s go around back,” she said. “Maybe their black vans are parked around there. I want my picture beside something with the T.A.P.S logo on it.”

So we walked down an alley beside the building. Behind the building, on a back fire escape, a couple men were sitting, drinking beer and gabbing. They watched us as we looked around.

No black vans. But then she saw it, parked nearby.

A Roto-Rooter van. Everyone who watches the show knows that Grant and Jason have day jobs as Roto-Rooter plumbers.

“That Roto-Rooter van must be their van,” Lynn said. “Why else would it be parked here?”

So, rather embarrassed, she stood beside the van while I snapped her picture.

We did not take a picture of the building, other than these dark photos through the mail slot.

It seemed pointless to photograph a building that could have been any building on any street in America. But then again, why did we believe the Roto-Rooter van to belong to Grant and Steve?

Because it had to be. Because we needed to believe.

Lynn went back to our van and wrote a brief note on hotel stationary, telling the Ghosthunters that we had paid them a visit. She told them how far we had travalled in hopes of getting a photo of the T.A.P.S. building with signage. She left an email address and a physical address and said she hoped (perhaps) to receive an autographed picture. She has a crush on the bald-headed Grant.

Then we got back in the van, and with a few backward glances left the scene to find a restaurant. Seafood at the harbor. That’s what we wanted. We ended up at a restaurant on the harbour called Lobstermania, where none of us ordered lobster.

I don’t like lobster, and Lynn objects to the way they are killed for human consumption. Instead, she got fish and chips and I got steak and shrimp. Lynn’s mother had stuffed scallops. We watched the sun set over a harbor full of yachts setting sail, docking, or lilting slowly on their ropes, tied to the docks.

Did Lynn regard our excursion as a bust? Not really. Sometimes you have to take a chance and go off course in order to have even a small adventure. That is how we are both looking upon our day in Warwick, Rhode Island.