Birthday fun

Tuesday found us in Newport, RI for the famous mansions tour. www.newportmansions.org

The history here is just amazing.  The Breakers was built by the Vanderbilt family between 1893-1895 and has just under 63,000 square feet of living space!  Yes, that is right, 63 thousand!

We also visited The Elms, which was completely different from the Breakers, but also quite amazing. The Preservation Society of Newport has done an amazing job with these homes, many of which were slated to be torn down over the years.

Wednesday we took the one hour ferry ride from Point Judith(near our house) to Block Island.

 I seem to find one place on each of our vacations that just hits everything that I love and Block Island was it!  Each shop that we stopped in was more charming than the last.  The scenery and homes were so New England.

We knew that we wanted to rent some mode of transportation, but because we have such different ideas of what would be "fun", some wanted a jeep, others wanted scooters and still others wanted bikes.  In the end, it wasn't our decision, because there were no jeeps available and Jane was not feeling confident with the scooter and having one of her siblings needing to be on the back, so bikes it was!(that was my choice)  And it was GREAT!

 We rode from one end of the island to the other on very hilly terrain, as in hills that you had to get off your bike to walk it up.   Those kids were troopers.  The weather helped because it was the most perfect day, sun was out, but the breeze coming off the ocean was cool.  We saw some amazing sights, probably things that wouldn't have been appreciated from a jeep.  The lighthouse marks the north end of the island and the first settlers arrived in 1661!  They unloaded their cattle off of their ships and had them swim to shore.

When we rode to the south end of the island, there was stopping point where you could walk down(and back up!) 120 stairs to the ocean.  So beautiful.  At the top of these stairs there is a look out point where you can see Montauk, NY.

Block Island is definitely a place that we will return to in the future, most likely to stay right on the island.

Thomas won't be happy about this one, but he has been struggling all trip long without sunglasses and having to have his picture taken into the sun.  The face on this picture is priceless!