Episode 58 | Newport, Rhode Island
Newport, Rhode Island. Where opulence meets the ocean.
That’s what the ChatGPT script said. I read it out loud to the camera and immediately abandoned it. It’s not wrong, exactly, but it’s also not me, and at this point I’ve made my peace with the fact that I’m not going to suddenly start narrating like a PBS documentary just because I’m standing in front of Gilded Age money.
The rain had followed me from Mystic. I checked into a hotel on the harbor, paid for parking, and noted that Rhode Island was going to be the most expensive stop of the season for reasons I couldn’t entirely pin down. That’s how it goes sometimes.
Thames Street
I crossed the street and found Thames Street, which is one of those places that hits you unexpectedly. Cobblestones, old brick, the scale of everything slightly compressed the way it is in old New England towns, a feeling that you’ve wandered somewhere between coastal Connecticut and an older version of London. I walked it until the rain picked back up, found a place called Moors Landing for dinner, and ordered the tuna rare on the recommendation of someone at the bar. Covered in cracked pepper. It was excellent.
Plans for tomorrow: the Breakers, a couple of the other mansions, an early walk, more of the town. Tonight belonged to the rain and the cobblestones.
The Camera Test
I’ll be honest about what this episode is partly about. I had the DJI Osmo Action 5 out for the first time and wanted to see what it could do in low light on wet city streets at blue hour. This is the kind of thing that sounds boring when you say it plainly and looks either great or terrible when you watch it back later.
Blue hour on a rainy cobblestone street, with the reflections of the yellow street lamps stretching across the wet stones, is not a bad place to run a low light test. I wandered back toward the hotel under the trees, the headlights of passing cars doing interesting things with the shadows, thinking about a trip to London decades ago when I first saw green light under a bridge near Big Ben and tried to photograph it with a film camera and no tripod. It didn’t come out. Some shots you chase for years before you have the right gear.
The action cam footage, I think, came out reasonably well. There was a giant pumpkin near the end of the walk that I may have filmed longer than necessary. Halloween was coming. Rhode Island was leaning into it.
Tomorrow the mansions. Tonight the rain.
