|
We didn't mean to go West-erly,
really. Not the first time anyway.
We were actually trying to get to Newport, 45 minutes up the Rhode Island coast. My wife and I had each left some fond memories there, mine
from having spent a year at Rogers High School while my father studied at the
Naval War College, Marcia's from having attended the Naval Officers Candidate
School there herself. We weren't married back then, mind you--but we both
used to wax poetic about our solo days in Newport and it occurred to us several years back that it might be nice to
revisit that one common stomping ground, but to do it together this time.
Just to compare notes, y'know?
By the time we acted on that idea, however, we discovered that just about
every decent, affordable hotel room in Newport was booked for the upcoming summer season. So we waited until the
following Spring--but forgot to make advance reservations and were shut out
again as a result. Likewise the next year. And again the year after that. And
so on until the Spring of 1999, when we finally did some research and booked
a very affordable room in Westerly, way over by the Connecticut border. We
figured since Rhode Island was such a tiny State, we could just spend all of
our waking moments in Newport (where the action was), then scurry back to our
distant hotel at night to sleep in whatever that place was called. Waverly?
Oh, Westerly, right, that's it.
It didn't quite work out that way though: Newport was crowded, expensive,
loud, obnoxious in all the ways that Saratoga Springs can be obnoxious when
the track season is in full swing and the monied people are behaving very
badly indeed. The famous Mansions seemed gaudy and depressing. Cliff Walk had
litter and graffiti problems. Ocean Drive looked like the Long Island Expressway during rush hour. Thames Street had been Banana Republicked. And our daughter Katelin was pretty
thoroughly bored by all of it, a factor we'd not really considered in our
rapturous reveries of our own younger days.
So we fled back to Westerly--and fell in love with what we found there. As had many before us:
the Town of Westerly and its subsidiary villages of Watch Hill, Weekapaug and
Shelter Harbor have long stood as more intimate, humanly-scaled counterpoints
to the more ostentatious fare found upcoast in Newport. There are mansions in
Westerly, sure--but you can imagine living in them, and somehow that makes
all the difference in the world.
There's history in Westerly, too: the Niantic Indians settled in the area
long before the English incorporated the Town of Westerly in 1669 as a
frontier village in what was then known as the King's Province. By the mid
1700s, a watch post had been established on the highest knoll in Westerly (earning Watch Hill its name), later to be replaced by a series of
lighthouses, the first erected in 1806. Rich veins of granite were discovered
in Westerly, too, and you can find stone cut from the town's high quality
quarries in a variety of prominent public buildings throughout New York and New England.
Westerly experienced its greatest economic boom as a vacation hotspot in the
late nineteenth century, both for those wealthy enough to build their own
homes and for those of more modest means who took accommodations in such
public lodges as the venerable Ocean House, which still dominates Watch
Hill's topography from its beachfront perch. The beaches that drew many of
those early tourists to Westerly are still intact for the most part, too,
with a small public strand in Watch Hill, the Westerly Town Beach and the
Misquamicut State Beach providing nearly seven miles worth of easy-access
Oceanfront fun between them.
I have to admit, though, that that's not what makes me appreciate Westerly, since getting a load of sand in my shorts is one of the quickest
ways for me to have a day ruined irreparably. No, I prefer the attractions to
be found in Westerly Center, in Watch Hill Village and all along the Shore
Road, which doesn't border the shore at all, but instead hugs the Winnapaug
Pond, cuts through several golf courses and serves as home address to some
exceptional lodging establishments.
Take the Grandview Bed and Breakfast (212 Shore Road, Westerly, RI 02891; 1-800-447-6384) for starters: we stayed there during our
first visit to Westerly, enjoying host Pat Grande's encyclopedic knowledge of all things Rhode Island, not to mention her fabulous breakfasts. The Grandview offered accommodations in a 17th century farmhouse, as well as
"dorm style" rooms in a newer wing. I had a jolly good time there
one rainy afternoon making profoundly gloomy noises on the antique pump
harmonium in the living room, although the other guests might not have held
that as a plus.
This summer we planned a longer trip with both Katelin and her friend
Alex--which meant we either had to spend lots of time at the beach or get a
hotel with a swimming pool to keep the pair of nine-year-olds occupied. We
chose the latter, taking a room at the Winnapaug Inn (169 Shore Road, Westerly, RI 02891; 1-800-288-9906), a relatively
new hotel just up the road from the Grandview. It provided a good bargain and was a good call from a keeping-busy
standpoint: we swam, admired the menu at the Inn's promising new
restaurant, played shuffleboard and walked down a manicured grass trail to
the Pond, where we collected snails and admired a monstrous beached horseshoe
crab.
Good fun, all around, as was the village of Watch Hill itself, anchored at the kink in Bay Street by the Watch Hill Carousel, allegedly the oldest "flying
horse" style carousel still in operation in America. Behind the Carousel stretches Napatree Point, a miniature, inverted
version of Cape Cod, minus the people, plus lots of protected osprey nesting sites.
It's isolated and very beautiful--and provides one of the few places on the
East Coast where you can watch the sun set over the Ocean, or at least an arm
of it. Worth the hike.
Other key Watch Hill landmarks include the St. Clair Annex Ice Cream Shop and
its attendant popcorn wagon (which produces what I believe to be the third
best buttered popcorn in America, behind only the Spectrum Theatre and
Minneapolis' Lake Calhoun Bandstand), the elegant old Olympia Tea Room, the
Lily Pad Gallery and a lovely rose-ringed seafront park with a monument to
Chief Ninigret, who puts the "watch" in Watch Hill as he gazes
endlessly across its harbor, no doubt still waiting for nefarious assault
from those accursed Montauks across the water.
Westerly Center has spectacular monuments and roses too, most of them in
Wilcox Park, a deliciously well-laid-out urban garden that defines Westerly's business district, roads and commerce be
damned. Most of the restaurants we favored were to be found in Westerly, too,
including the Three Fish (mid-priced, high-quality seafood), the Happy
Holliday Restaurant (affordable family-friendly Italian fare) and dozens of
Bess Eaton Shops, Rhode Island's infinitely superior regional antidote to
Dunkin' Donuts. Yum.
We rode a few miles up Route 1 to the Charlestown Lobster Pot for dinner one night, stopping at a most excellent shop
called Galapagos on the way for coffee, clothes, home decorations and loads
of other cool, gotta-see items imported by proprietors Sandra and David
Lanning. We were fortunate enough this year also to be in Charlestown when
the Big Apple Circus pitched its tent at Ninigret Park for the 14th
consecutive year, and we got to see a truly world-class Fourth of July
fireworks display in Wakefield, just another ten minutes up the road. Big
nights, both of those, and both oh-so-close to Westerly.
Other enjoyable day trips (for Marcia, Alex, Katelin and I alike--and it's no
mean feat to please everyone, as any parent knows) included the Green Animals
topiary garden in Portsmouth, the Nautilus submarine museum in Groton
and Mystic's Seaport and Aquarium. All of them were less than an hour from
our refreshing hotel swimming pool--as was Newport, although we never made it back there.
How
to Get There: It's three hours from Albany by
car, taking I-90 and the Mass Pike to Springfield, then shooting south on
I-91 to Hartford, then turning southeast on Connecticut Route 2--which
ultimately spits you out right at the mouth of the Westerly Bypass just before
you cross into Rhode Island. There's an Amtrak station in Westerly, too,
although you have to change trains in either Boston or New York City to get
there from here; it'll cost you $110 roundtrip and take 7 ½ hours each way to
do so. Flying's not terribly practical either: $281 roundtrip from Albany to Providence on US Airways Express, 40 minutes in the air, followed by a 40
minute drive or maybe another quick flight if you're willing to see what's
flying into the tiny Westerly Airport that day. We weren't so bold.
Copyright 2000: J. Eric Smith.
|