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It was nice seeing my brother Jerry and his family last night, but that was the last of the family and friends visits for this trip. Today it's just Jody and I facing the world together! We somehow got our travel/ sightseeing sequence out of whack over the last couple of days. We normally travel in the morning and sightsee in the afternoon, but today we are riding over to Newport, RI in the morning and traveling in the afternoon. So after a quick hotel breakfast, we loaded up the bike for the 20 minute ride across the bridge to Newport.
Newport is about the last place where about a dozen of the mansions built during the gilded age still exist and are being preserved. There are guided tours & self-guided tours, trolleys, buses, & walking to get around and all kinds of packages of what to see. In the end, we had only 1 day, so we decided to parks the bike at the first mansion, The Breakers and walk to any others we might choose to see. From reading various websites, we thought we would like to see at least 3 or 4 mansions, along with checking out
the Cliff Walk along the shore. We bought the 5 mansion ticket which entitled us to visit most any 5 mansions we chose.
We started with the largest and most popular, The Breakers which was located by itself on Ochre Point Ave. This is the 70 room summer home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and was the largest and most spectacular of the mansions we saw. The sheer size of the place was overwhelming! The decorating of the time was way over the top, with elaborate finishes and materials just showing off how much money they really had. These places were showpieces intended to flaunt wealth and the most elaborate rooms were usually on the first floor. The decor on the upper floors was still ornate, but it appeared almost subdued compared to the first floor rooms.
Along with the opulence of the Vanderbilt occupants, there was almost a second entire house-behind-the house where the servants would perform their tasks while seeming to appear from nowhere. There was some exhibition of the servants areas, but my understanding is that there is a separate guided tour that specifically goes through the behind the scenes operation of the household. We used
the self-guided audio tour, which we don't usually like, but these were reasonably well done, and we could skip ahead when parts didn't interest us.
The only real complaint about audio tours is not the mechanics of using the audio equipment, but the "audio zombies" wandering the rooms. We tried to remain aware of our surroundings and the other people in the room, but sometimes we would find people wandering the room, or just standing in front of the most beautiful spot just staring into space while listening to the audio. But mostly it worked out ok. As far as pictures in the mansions, they used to be forbidden, but with the advent of the ubiquitous smart-phone, they have given up and allow photography throughout the house, as long as there is no flash, and for safety, no pictures while standing on the stairs. So we were able to take lots of pictures.
After The Breakers, we headed over to the second most popular mansion, The Elms, located on the main mansion road, Bellevue Ave. The owner of the Elms was a coal magnate Edward Berwind who was not nearly as famous as the Vanderbilts, and not quite
as rich. His house was not as over the top opulent as The Breakers, but it's claim to fame was the artwork. This was more of a museum type house, where the owner and his wife had collected various pieces of art from around the world and used the house as a vehicle for displaying it all. In addition to the paintings, there was a lot of sculpture throughout the house, but especially in the grounds behind the house. Jody always like the sculpture as it gives her inspiration for her own works.
On the way to the Marble House which was our intended third stop, we passed Rosecliff and decided to stop there instead. We were making good time, as the self-guided tours were going well. We always listened when they were describing the rooms, and things about the artwork, or some special features of the room, but we both tend to glaze over when they go into who married who, and which children they had. In fact, we both remarked that we would have liked to have heard more about the mansions themselves rather than the people who lived in them. But, evidently we are a little
different than most people. Now Rosecliff was a "new money" house, where Tessie Oelrichs built the house as a quintessential "party house", with the largest ballroom of all the mansions. While the overall size of the mansion was smaller and with less rooms than some of the others, the party areas were larger and more spectacular.
Evidently, Rosecliff is used today as a wedding venue and the second floor is used as a consulting area. Also on the second floor is an updated area with some more modern decor and it us used to display artwork and items of interest. For this year, they are displaying a collection of 42 original designs by Pierre Cardin, mostly form the 60's and 70's. I'm not usually a fashion buff, but some of these designs were really wild and some I remember from back then either on television or in magazines. It was an unexpected treat.
Our last mansion of the day was the Marble House which was another Vanderbilt mansion, this time it was Alva Vanderbilt. This mansion was back to the opulent design of The Breakers, except that it was mostly marble - actually over 500,000 cubic feet of
marble. The interesting thing, at least we thought it was interesting, was that the marble has a rich yellowish/ rust color running through most of it. This was intentional as it was though that with so much marble, it it was all white marble it would end up looking cold and sterile. With the large amounts of colored veining, it really did look spectacular.
By this time it was getting close to 2:00 and we were both over 15,000 steps for the day so far, so we decided we really didn't need to visit a fifth mansion, four was quite enough. So we headed back to The Breakers, both because that's where we left the bike, but that is also where we could enter Cliff Walk. Now Cliff Walk is a path along the shore, actually, since the shore is mostly a cliff, and the path is on the cliff above the shore, hence the clever name Cliff Walk. Cliff Walk actually goes a few miles above and a few miles below The Breakers, and if we had lots of time, it would be the kind of hike that both Jody and I would love. But by now we
were getting a little tired from walking and decide we would just follow Cliff Walk for a short distance, just long enough to get some good pictures.
The reason we were trying to get out of Newport at an early time, is that we new the hotel was in Groton, CT only about an hour away, but we wanted to stop at the Mystic Seaport in Mystic, CT an the way. So we cut back across the bridge on RT-138 and headed back south on US-1. We just continued to follow US-1 past last night's hotel, and on into Mystic. It was a little after 3:00 when we arrived in downtown Mystic. We were actually able to find a parking spot on the street, so we stopped and looked around at some of the funky shops and stopped for coffee. The coffee seemed to rejuvenate us a little, and we were a little disappointed in Mystic. I went back online and realized there was also an Olde Mystic Village shopping area with about 60 funky shops about a mile or so away. So we got back on the bike and made it over to Olde Mystic Village. Along the
way, we noticed other attractions and museums that also looked interesting, but we were running out of day.
When we arrived at Olde Mystic Village, it was more like what we had expected. We wandered through the various shops, Jody found some interesting beads for her jewelry. There was a lot of interesting stuff, but most of it just wouldn't fit on a motorcycle. What we didn't find were any good t-shirts. In fact, at the mansions, every one had a gift shop, and NONE had a single t-shirt for sale. Evidently t-shirts are below their dignity. As we finished our wandering, we realized we were getting hungry, so we stopped at a pizza place for some dinner before riding the last 10 miles to the hotel. Dinner was great, and by the time we reached the hotel, we were ready to relax.
Tomorrow, we begin our effort to actually turn south and in the process, circumvent New York City. We have a kind of convoluted path for the next couple of days as we try to visit the remaining northeastern states before we make that hard turn south to Virginia. First thing in the morning we are
visiting the Submarine Force Museum which is only about a mile away where we will also tour the Nautilus submarine. It shouldn't take long as we are on our way to West Orange, NJ to visit the Thomas Edison National Historical Park.
81.2 Miles Today
6488.3 Miles Total
5.286 Gallons Today
162.836 Gallons Total
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