Travel with Nat: Newport

Sarah Kendall House

From Providence, we caught a $2 one-hour-twenty-minute bus ride out to Newport. Along the way, saw some nice green countryside and a lovely historic town called Bristol along the way. Once arrived at the info centre and all knowledged-up, we rolled our cases over to Washington Street along the waterfront to our BnB, Sarah Kendall House, a lovingly restored and furnished 1871 three-storey house with a turret. The late afternoon/sunset photos were taken from a jetty across the road from the BnB. We'd already decided to stay at least two nights and set on staying three once we realised how much there was in Newport to see and had tasted the cooked breakfast included in our room fee.

We amazed ourselves by visiting three of the famed Newport mansions or 'cottages' as they were known, two built by Vanderbilts, The Breakers and Marble House, and another that was owned by a Colorado silver heiress and a great party-thrower, Rosecliff. The house was the backdrop for the 1970s film of The Great Gatsby. The houses, especially the Vanderbilt ones, were absolute sensory overload. You aren't allowed to take pictures inside the houses and I guess that's because cameras would blow up with the amount of gold leaf, marble, silks and crystal chandeliers. Our favourite for the day was Rosecliff, because it was a bit more 'normal' and had a lovely ballroom with doors on either side leading out to terraces and the garden.

Some of the mansions had been pulled down to make way for shopping malls etc (if you wanted some open space, there seemed no option but to knock down someone's over-decorated white elephant, because so many litter the area and most were left empty for decades), but there was a concerted effort from the 1960s to preserve the ones that remained.

A lot of the interiors were designed and assembled in France by the same popular decorator. They were then disassembled and then reassembled in Newport. Everything was copied or inspired by some European palace or manor house, so I did feel that the 'gilded age' was indeed all on the surface, without anything particularly original or American. The one house that offered some new architectural ideas for the time - more open plan and including the outdoors - was unfortunately closed.

However, we were happy to be gobsmacked by the numbers, extensive grounds and grandiosity of the area.

We took a tour around the very pretty and occasionally sublime Ocean Drive, and looked around two more mansions the next day, The Elms and Chateau Sur Mer. The Elms was again rather grand, but gave the feeling of a rather loved family home, as much as such a place can. All the mansions except Chateau Sur Mer offered audio tours as part of the entry and they were invaluable. The Elms was originally owned by a couple who had their nieces come visit often and they all seemed to be quite jolly. The sister of the man who built it inherited it and was something of a character. She would let the local children play on the lawn and sent cookies, milk and lemonade out to them. She kept the house running as it always had up until her death in the 1960s.

View from the cliff walk

Chateau Sur Mer was one of the older cottages, built around 1852 and extended in the 1870s. It was amazingly dark, though maybe darker than originally as the wallpaper and other decorations would have tarnished over the years, and emphatically late Victorian, with no surface left undecorated. Some of the decorations, by themselves, were exquisite, but the final impression was busy, busy, busy, with a side order of ornament.

It was amazing that the later mansions, built for vast sums of money and expected to be used by dynasties, only had very short lives as family and social summer houses. The Breakers, the most stately, was built in 1895 and the last summer the family spent there was 1937. Women used to spend around $1.2 million per season just on clothes. Then came income tax.

Our second full day in Newport finished with around three miles of the Cliff Walk, a scenic walk around the shore and across the lawns of many mansions. It was quite rough in places and Roberta had to negotiate it clutching her shopping bag from earlier in the day. We hobbled our way over long country lanes to find the first bus stop back. This was the most tiring day yet and, though we didn't bicycle the Ocean Drive, felt that we had put a good measure of work into our Newport experience. The bus driver was a bit heavy on the brakes and accelerator, so I felt a bit queasy in the end and only ate half a chopped salad for dinner. That left me nice and hungry for our cooked BnB breakfast. Mmmmm.

Back to Providence and Amtrak to New York, New York. We are staying next to the Natural History Museum at the Excelsior Hotel, which turns out to be clean and well-furnished.