Another year has passed and it was Kim’s birthday again, this year we took a little weekend trip to Newport in Rhode Island which was a very easy hour and half drive away.
When we got there Friday afternoon we headed straight to the harbour for dinner.
There’s a lot of money in Newport, it’s a fairly pricey area and there are lots of big boats and big houses, designer shops etc. But it is also where the rich people used to build their summer mansions in the ‘gilded age’ (think Great Gatsby) along the cliffs.
There’s also a big maritime history in Newport and we found a lot of ivory being sold (!). Now I thought that this would be illegal but it turns out the law changes depending on what animal the ivory comes from (e.g. walrus, whales, elephants, rhinos etc), how old it is, if you take it across state lines etc. It was pretty horrible.
Kim’s parents bought us a touristy trip on a sailboat around the harbour which was really fun, they told stories about the area and had drinks.
Including one about this funny house called ‘Clingstone’ built in the middle of nowhere where the owner took the city to court, and won, to stop paying property taxes as he said the city doesn’t plough any roads for him, collect his garbage etc… which is fair enough! You can rent this house out for thousands if you don’t mind spending years on the waiting list.
On Saturday I discovered how to use a waffle iron at our hotel.
And we set off out to look around the Newport Mansions. These are fancy Mansions that were previously owned by a lot of wealthy miserable people and then sold off and preserved.
There was a rather good free audio tour in each house as you walked round at your own pace with information about the house and who used to live there.
Each family described seemed more tragic and unhappy than the last.
I’m not sure what they had to moan about though, money might not buy happiness but I’d be willing to give it a go.
For all the mansions lovely decor, they were not air conditioned and it was a very very hot day and all the mansions were stuffed with other tourists milling about.
Thankfully most of the schools had gone back so there were hardly any children so that was nice not to add screaming to the heat! Although looking round dusty old mansions would probably be a small child’s idea of hell. The owners of all of the mansions were clearly nouveau riche and did not think it was at all tacky to stuff their New England houses with Italian marble, to floral, to gothic cathedral style rooms leading into completely different Grecian themed ballrooms.
One house even had a Chinese tea house in the garden! It was like each house had tried to out do the next set of neighbours to seem more daring and exotic.
We stopped for lunch in the tea house.
And then it was back on the road again. On a map the Mansions are deceptively close to one another, but what you forget is that each one is massive and takes ages to walk between them. They had car parks for each one but a couple of times I said “Oh the next house is only next door, let’s just walk” to Kim – only to regret it miles later in the blistering heat (I exaggerate, but still!). There were lots of these little two seater scooter things zooming about between the houses, I got the impression that they annoyed all other road users but I thought they looked quite fun.
But we soldiered on. It was about $30 something to see 5 houses and you could pick which ones you saw – you could see more but it took us the entire day just to see 5 so you would have to spread more over a few days at least. I thought the price was a little steep at first but after looking around the size of the houses, the upkeep, the quality of all the tours and all those staff members it seemed very reasonable.
We started out with the biggest houses owned by the Vanderbilts and the such like.
And worked our way down to the slightly smaller mansions.
In the smaller mansions we got a tour guide instead of an audio tour, all for that one admission price.
The tour guides were great but the small tour group size made it all the more noticeable when we got stuck with a man-splainer who seemed to think he should be running the tour… a different one each time, what a treat for us!
Then we went out for a fancy dinner.
On Sunday (Kim’s actual birthday) we headed back to the fur babies and I constructed this year’s cake. You all remember the rules, birthday person chooses the theme, and the non-birthday-person must construct the cake with NO COOKING. This year Kim didn’t know what to pick and chose a surprise so I chose to depict a homage to the epic classic 80s song ‘Africa’ by Toto as Kim enjoys singing it loudly with the wrong lyrics at the top of her lungs. I was pleased with the results.
And just like that it’s September… crazy.
hayleyiraina 