Newport, Rhode Island

We arrived in Rhode Island early on Friday evening and decided to drive the Ocean Drive around the coast while it was still light. We drove past some of the mansions that Newport is famous for so that I could choose which to visit the next day.

Chris says that I am a real house geek.  I absolutely love visiting houses so walking around mansion houses is a dream day for me! I think there are about 9 mansions that you can actually tour in Newport but we only had time to do one so I chose the grandest - the Breakers. On Saturday morning, we were waiting outside for it to open at 9am and were the second couple in beating all the crowds that we saw arriving later.

I have toured loads of houses but this one was just something else, I thought it was amazing. It was built in 1895 by Cornelius Vanderbilt and the decoration downstairs in particular was so grand, the walls in one room were even lined with platinum!

One of the things that I really enjoyed about the tour is that we were able to walk around the whole house. I'm always disappointed when you look around somewhere and find that most of the rooms are closed off but you were literally able to walk through everywhere on the first 2 levels including the bathrooms and kitchens.

After walking through the house and grounds we picked up the coastal path which runs along the back of some of the mansions. It was great to be able to walk along by the sea whilst peering into the gardens of the mansions on the other side.

It started to get pretty hot after a while and we realised we still had a long way to walk if we wanted to get to the end of the path so we decided to turn back and save some time to check out the town as well. I really liked Newport, not only were the mansions and coast really beautiful but the town was lovely. We stopped for lunch and also had a quick look at the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

I would love to return to Newport at some point and spend a few days here, after all I still have another 8 houses to see!