Episode 59 | Newport, Rhode Island
I set the alarm for sunrise and woke up to a garbage truck.
Not a seagull. Not the sound of the harbor. A garbage truck, working its way along the waterfront with the particular efficiency of a vehicle that does not care about your morning plans. I stood at the window anyway, recorder running, and thought about Bergen, Norway, where I’d once gotten up before dawn to walk the harbor and found the same thing — seagulls in the background, street sweepers and delivery trucks in the foreground, the working sounds of a city that doesn’t pause because someone wants to make a nice audio clip.
After a while that became its own kind of soundtrack. The sounds of a place getting ready for the day. I kept recording.
The rabbits were back, bouncing around below the window. Newport, it turns out, has rabbits. I have no explanation for this.
What a Room Costs
Before I hit the road to see the mansions — and yes, I’m aware of how that sentence sets up — I want to talk about hotel pricing in Newport, because it’s something I couldn’t stop thinking about.
I’d wanted a small bed and breakfast somewhere in old Newport, something in the neighborhood of two hundred dollars a night. It doesn’t exist. What I found, after considerable searching, was a harbor-side hotel room with a view among the yachts and a shower that had seen better days, for a price that I won’t embarrass myself by stating in full. The alternatives weren’t much better. Several properties in the area were running between four and twelve hundred dollars a night during shoulder season. High season runs higher.
I’ve been traveling enough this year to know this isn’t isolated to Newport. Lodging across the board has become something that the average family, the actual middle class, can barely afford. A Holiday Inn Express is two hundred dollars and up. A decent Airbnb in a desirable area clocks in around the same. I spent my twenties doing Europe on five to ten dollars a night in youth hostels — the Latin Quarter in Paris, a mountain hostel in Gimmelwald, Greek pensions on the islands. I know that was thirty years ago and prices have changed. They haven’t changed enough to explain this.
I grew up serving wealth. I ran a lighting and production company in South Florida for years, did events in Palm Beach homes and private clubs, and I’ve always understood that the concentration of money in certain places creates an economy that employs a lot of people and makes a lot of things possible. That’s never bothered me. I don’t begrudge a Vanderbilt mansion. I find it genuinely interesting.
What I find harder to square is the sense that the gap is widening past the point where ordinary travel is possible for ordinary people. The workers I watched loading linens into the back of the hotel that morning, the delivery trucks, the catering crews setting up for what looked like a wedding somewhere around the corner — they’re not staying in these hotels. They live somewhere else and drive in. That’s always been true in wealthy resort towns, and it’s worth noticing.
It’s a weird setup for a mansion tour. I noticed that too.
Ocean Drive
I checked out, threw the luggage in the car, and took Ocean Drive around the southern tip of the peninsula before heading up to the Breakers. This is the move in Newport if you have a car and a few hours. The road runs along the cliffs past Brenton Point State Park, rocks dropping down to the water, open ocean on one side, the backs of extraordinarily expensive homes on the other. A cruise ship was working its way into the harbor, tendering passengers ashore by smaller boats. The tourist information woman had mentioned it would be coming in. She wasn’t wrong.
I pulled over where the rocks reached the water and thought about the light. Morning would be better here. Sunset would be better. Midday with the action cam running is still not bad, but I made a note about Brenton Point for anyone coming back with more time and better intentions.
The mansions will keep until the next episode. There was a lot of ground to cover and I wanted to give the Breakers the time it deserves rather than rushing through with one eye on the clock and the other on the next stop.
Narragansett tonight. A place called the Surf Shack. More on that next time.
