Our first experience with Rhode Island was Providence. There’s a lot of cool, restored old houses here, but it looks like they skipped rehabbing the commercial buildings and built new ones instead, which are a little too contrived-looking to be cool. They’ve done something neat with their downtown waterway, though. Down the center are a line of iron baskets elevated a few inches above the waterline, where they have bonfires.

Watch Hill is located at the southern-most point of Rhode Island, on the ocean. It was there that we saw the Flying Horse Carousel—an absolute work-of-art merry-go-round, right on the beach. Each horse, suspended from the rafters, is hand-carved from a single piece of wood, includes leather tack and has real horse hair tails and mane. And they still let children ride. (No wet bathing suits, please.)

And just when we thought we’d seen enough fancy oceanfront houses, we happened upon Newport. This is an area where all kinds of New York money people chose to build summer “cottages” in the late 1800s. These palatial mammoths are awe-inspiring and majestic—think Mall of America in gothic revival. The Vanderbilt’s cottage, named The Breakers, cost something like $11 million to build (in 1895!). I think those that inhabit these huge mansions now must be regular folk though, because we saw an ice cream truck making its rounds and the Bomb Pop prices seemed reasonable.