Days 49 - 51

It was a short (one-hour) but beautiful drive to our next destination. It is hard to believe that Rhode Island is even considered a state. Its population is 1.1 million. (Our home city of San Jose is just shy of a million people) but Rhode Island gets their own two senators and four votes in the Electoral College! Newport is the place where America's wealthiest built lavish mansions as "summer cottages" during the "gilded-age" of America. We took a trolly tour to see all that Newport had to offer.

The tour trolly first cruised along the shoreline.

That white dot across the bay is a light house. I tried zooming in on my Samsung smartphone camera to see how the picture came out. Can you believe it? It came out amazingly well!

There are many mansions in Newport with many that were built during the Gilded Age (roughly 1870 to 1900.) We learned from the tour guide that the term "Gilded-Age" was actually coined by Mark Twain in his lesser-known book-The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. He meant it as a derogatory term referring to how the glamorous and opulent lifestyle of America's most wealthy was a thin veneer (gilde) hiding the ruthless business practices upon which their wealth was obtained. This yellow house is the Eisenhower House, where Dwight D. would recreate for the summer and is now part of Fort Adams State Park. This other mansion is now owned by Jay Leno. Wow! He comes out annually to host a Concours d'Elegance car show, so he needed a place to keep an extra set of clothes!

Notice the locomotive on the left and the sledge hammer on the right, incorporating classical imagery with modern day industrial reality.

Experimenting with a Panoramic shot.

Disclosure - I couldn't get a good picture of Leno's mansion from the trolly, so I grabbed this picture off of the internet.

The tour included gaining access to one of the mansions that are open to the public and we chose The Breakers for our tour. The Breakers is the most popular of the Newport mansions due to its impressive architecture and interior decorating as well as its prominent location on a point overlooking the ocean. It was completed in 1895, it has 70 rooms on five floors and occupies 138,300 square feet. The interior design was intended to emulate Italian mansion style. It was built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II, who only got to enjoy it for one year before being disabled by a stroke.

Tomorrow we head out and continue our adventure. We'll be stopping for just one night in New Jersey at a Farm Animal Rescue Sanctuary. We'll get to feed the rescued animals and I hope to get some good pictures of them.

For those of you that are interested in the technical aspects of RV living, we had a mishap during our stay in Newport. [if this is boring to you, feel free to skip.] There is a valve within the bowels of the trailer that activates when the trailer is connected to an outside water source. This valve allows the outside water to flow in one direction - to all the water taps in the trailer, but is supposed to stop the outside water from flowing in the other direction - to the trailer's water tank and overflowing it. This valve has always worked and has not given us any trouble - until yesterday. Susan awoke to find one corner of our trailer damp with water. A piece of sand or something must have held the valve open a bit allowing water to overflow our water tank. There is a hose that is supposed to discharge any overflow safely to the outside, but apparently this hose isn't 100% tight and water bubbled up from the water tank and ran onto the floor and onto the carpet in the corner. John thinks he has dislodged the sand from the valve, and we spent yesterday and today using Susan's hair dryer to dry the damp carpet. Stay tuned to see if this causes us any more problems going forward.

The view of the back side of the house that faces the ocean and the Cliff Walk.