Newport, RI

Last weekend we spent Friday driving through Rhode Island. We did a quick stop at the Roger Williams park in Providence and decided to keep going to Newport. The Roger Williams Park area just didn't make us want to spend much time there. Newport, on the other hand, was an adorable town. Full of restaurants and shops. I wish I would have taken a picture of the scenic downtown, but we just drove through it.  In brief, Newport is home to many very large mansions that the wealthy folks of the late 19th and early 20th centuies used as vacation homes when it got too hot in the summers down in New York.

You can see the bridge, in the background, that we had to take to get to Newport.

We spent the afternoon walking along the Cliff Walk, looking at ocean on one side, with the the local mansions on the other side.  Apparently you can pay to walk through the mansions, but neither of us was up for that.  It was pretty pricey. Opulence, for sure.

This is a Chinese Tea House that you could only get to through one of the mansions.  Not entirely sure of the purpose of the Tea House, but I imagine that the ultra-rich wanted to have an authentic place to take their afternoon tea.  The parlor in the mansion wasn't good enough.

After the Cliff Walk, we headed to Third and Second beaches. It was a little cold at this point, but we enjoyed picking up a few shells for our collection. The beaches are surrounded by a wildlife refuge, and we saw two deer having dinner in the fields.

To finish off the evening, we headed back into the downtown portion of Newport for dinner. We ate at Cafe Zelda (Kyle was psyched, even though he failed to find the Master Sword there) and topped it off with some chocolate toffee crunch from a local candy store. The rest of the shops were already closed for the evening, but it would be a fun town to browse through.