Frommer’s EasyGuide to Rhode Island. Barbara Rogers
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Frommer’s Star Ratings System
Every hotel, restaurant, and attraction listed in this guide has been ranked for quality and value. Here’s what the stars mean:
| Recommended | |
| Highly Recommended | |
| A must! Don't miss! |
AN IMPORTANT NOTE
The world is a dynamic place. Hotels change ownership, restaurants hike their prices, museums alter their opening hours, and buses and trains change their routings. And all of this can occur in the several months after our authors have visited, inspected, and written about, these hotels, restaurants, museums, and transportation services. Though we have made valiant efforts to keep all our information fresh and up-to-date, some few changes can inevitably occur in the periods before a revised edition of this guidebook is published. So please bear with us if a tiny number of the details in this book have changed. Please also note that we have no responsibility or liability for any inaccuracy or errors or omissions, or for inconvenience, loss, damage, or expenses suffered by anyone as a result of assertions in this guide.
On the western bluffs of Newport, Rhode Island, Castle Hill Lighthouse guards the entrance to Narragansett Bay.
CONTENTS
The Rhode Island Coast
Block Island
3Planning Your Trip to New England
Ready for an Atlantic sunrise over Tenants Harbor, Maine.
ABOUT THE AUTHORs
Kim Knox Beckius is a Connecticut-based travel writer who has hugged a baby moose, tasted 38 different whoopie pies in one sitting, and sent hundreds of free fall leaves in the mail to autumn lovers around the world. She is a Yankee Magazine Contributing Editor, owner of EverythingNewEngland.com, New England Expert for TripSavvy.com (formerly About.com) and the author of seven books including Backroads of New England and New England’s Historic Homes & Gardens. She lives in the Hartford area.
Leslie Brokaw has worked on more than a dozen Frommer’s Guides to Québec and New England. She is an editor for MIT Sloan Management Review and teaches at Emerson College. She and her family live outside of Boston.
Brian Kevin is the editor in chief of Down East magazine and has written for Outside, Travel + Leisure, The New York Times, Audubon and other magazines. His work has been recognized or anthologized in Best Food Writing, Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing and he’s the author of The Footloose American: Following the Hunter S. Thompson Trail Across South America. He lives in Hope, Maine.
Herbert Bailey Livesey has written about food and travel for over 40 years, authoring or contributing to Frommer’s Montreal & Quebec City, Frommer’s Europe, and Frommer’s New England. In addition, he wrote and revised five guidebooks in the earlier American Express series, which were translated into 11 languages. Scores of his articles have been published in Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Playboy, New York, and Yankee.
Laura Reckford has been exploring and writing about Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, as well as other parts of New England, for more than 20 years. She is the founder and CEO of Cape Cod Wave, an online magazine covering the culture and character of Cape Cod. She is also the executive director of the Falmouth Art Center. She resides in Falmouth, MA.
Barbara Radcliffe Rogers is co-author of seven guidebooks to Italy, three to Spain, and several others covering Europe, Atlantic Canada, and New England. She writes regularly for Global Traveler Magazine and other magazines, newspapers, and websites. Her taste for travel began when she moved to Verona, Italy, soon after graduating from Boston University, and she has since visited every country in Western Europe, and much of Eastern Europe and Latin America. Barbara currently lives in New Hampshire. Wherever she is, she’s likely to be skiing in the winter and kayaking in the summer and discovering new flavors for her blog, Worldbite.
Award-winning travel writer Bill Scheller is a 30-year Vermont resident. His books include America: A History in Art; Colonial New England on Five Shillings a Day; and, with his wife Kay, Best Vermont Drives. Among his more than 300 published articles are numerous features in Yankee magazine on his adopted state. He lives in Randolph, Vermont.
Stillman Rogers is a travel writer and photographer, co-author of guidebooks to Portugal, Italy, and Spain’s Canary Islands, as well as the eastern U.S. and Canada. His photographs have been published in books, magazines, and regularly on Global Traveler’s family travel website, WhereverFamily. He writes about destinations and skiing and has a monthly newspaper travel column. His first foreign travel was after graduating from Harvard, when he was stationed in Italy for 3 years; Italy still remains one of his favorite subjects for photography.
Erin Trahan is an arts journalist who specializes in film, TV, and travel. She is a regular contributor to WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, and she teaches at Emerson College. She has written extensively for Frommer’s Travel Guides. Erin lives in Marblehead, MA.
1
Rhode Island
By Barbara Radcliffe Rogers & Stillman Rogers
Water defines “Little Rhody” as much as mountain peaks characterize Colorado. The Atlantic Ocean borders its southeastern side, not in one smooth coastline but in a delightfully ragged, sea-fringed edge of islands, inlets, and the large basin that is Narragansett Bay. Indeed, while this tiny state measures only 37 miles east to west—you can easily drive from end to end in under an hour—within those 37 miles Rhode Island tucks in some 400 miles of seacoast. No wonder its official nickname is the Ocean State!
At the northern point of Narragansett Bay, 30 miles from the open ocean, lies Providence, the state capital, founded in 1636 by theologian Roger Williams. A couple of years later, another group of Puritan exiles established a settlement on an island in the Narragansett Bay known to the Narragansett tribe as Aquidneck. Settlers thought their new home resembled the Isle of Rhodes in the Aegean, so the region’s name became “Rhode Island and Providence Plantations”—a title that eventually came to be used for the entire state.
Rhode Island’s most important coastal town, Newport, is the best reason for an extended visit here. Newport’s first era of prosperity was during the Colonial period, when its ships plied new mercantile routes to China. The city also was central to the reprehensible “Triangle Trade” of rum