If It’s Frigid It Must Be Newport

A sharp imagination is useful when you’re waiting for summer to hit after seven months of winter. During the springtime days that so slowly crawl into hot-ish weather, I some years wind up traveling to Newport, Rhode Island in an attempt to help push the season into being. One of the most happening towns on the East Coast, Newport bursts to life in a serious manner when the season officially arrives on Memorial Day weekend. Like people, though, this little New England town has trouble waiting for summer and opens its closed-for-winter doors to the world when it feels the air slightly warming. After traveling along the highway past thawing trees just beginning to bloom green, arriving at this spot on the sea does help me pretend that summer is, at last, born.

One of Newport’s biggest draws is its 19th Century mansions, misused as mere summer cottages by the stupefyingly wealthy in the Roaring 20′s and earlier. These buildings, large enough to house a village, are now put to far better use as open houses through which tourists walk and gawk. At the Breakers, the grandest of the Newport mansions and also its most popular, an approximately two-hour line awaited me the one time I decided to embark on an exploration of its 65,000 square feet, I was with someone in a wheelchair, and a woman immediately pulled us out of line and led us through a tiny side entrance into the mega house. We didn’t need the special treatment, but I did not fight my way back out into the crowd. Instead, we took a rare ride in an elevator that was installed when the home’s original owner, Cornelius Vanderbilt, suffered a stroke. We then joined up with a group of people who’d endured the lengthy outside wait and took a tour through the mansion’s 70 rooms, loaded up with jaw dropping wealth.

I’m far happier, as are many people, walking around the backs of the mansions on a pathway at the edge of a cliff running alongside the Atlantic Ocean. Approximately two-thirds of this 3.5-mile Cliff Walk are pure and simple sidewalk. Travel far enough, though, and you’ll stop strolling and start balancing, very carefully, on rocks and boulders jutting out of the sand and leading you on a precarious and challenging path to the end. Or you can be boring and turn back.

My boyfriend and I love traveling to Newport together most every year, wanting to get a head start on the summer. Scores of shops, bed and breakfasts and restaurants are stationed around Newport’s harbor, which, like every good harbor, fills with sailboats when summer hits. It is difficult to believe that my favorite season is so close by when the air still hangs about, frigid. Enough boats stand anchored in this harbor in the pre-summer weeks, though, to make it somewhat possible to pretend that the season is blasting away.

Inexplicably, during all of our trips to Newport, my boyfriend and I have taken almost no photos. Here is one shot, though, which he took last spring, of a lone boat that caught both our eyes. Often, even in the midst of loud and gaudy glamour, it is the simple things that stand out the most.

The Breakers and the Cliff Walk photos by pshutterbug