BY CAILIN BURKE

Our first morning waking up in Newport was perfect as we were greeted with the most adorable small plates breakfast ever. The assortment was so unique and you could take as much as you wanted. Some of my favorites were the chocolate scones, bread and bacon jam, and the cute way they served their eggs.

After being sufficiently fueled up, we knew we wanted to spend our first full day doing the Cliff Walk, which is a 3.5 mile walk that goes along the ocean and brushes against some of Newport’s famous mansions. Since we had been on a lot of mansion tours before and were kind of short on time, we thought seeing the buildings while doing Cliff Walk was the best use of our day. We wanted to be super adventurous and start Cliff Walk from the end, which is the part that doesn’t have much of a path and involves you jumping across rocks to find your way.

The front end of the walk is all paths and guard rails, which is great if you want a leisurely stroll, but I just love climbing on rocks so I wanted to do the fun part first. We were really lucky that it ended up being a beautiful day to do this and it was so nice that we were even able to take our coats off! It was super rocky and muddy around Reject’s Beach where we started the walk, but once we made it to The Breakers, the famous Vanderbilt home, everything was a really easy walk. Plus after hours and hours of climbing on rocks, we needed a break to just stare at the mansions and be on a guided path.

After the walk, we went back to The Attwater, got a little dressed up and went to the harbor to see all of the sailboats on our way to dinner. We wanted seafood yet again so we chose to go to The Mooring, which is really popular in Newport. Since it was our one big meal of the trip we kind of went full out getting appetizers, drinks, and lobster… For our appetizer we got a bag of doughnuts which are lobster, crab and shrimp fritters served with a chipotle-maple aioli. The aioli was insane! We asked for seconds and I feel like I could put it on anything. Then for drinks, Tara got a Strawberry Limoncello to feel really vacation-y while I got a drink called “The Perfect Storm” mainly because I love ginger beer. We finally both opted for a lobster croissant because the thought of eating lobster in Newport just seemed right. Everything was amazing and totally worth the price; plus we had a waterfront view which made it even better! After that we headed back to our hotel, had their delicious free cookies, and got ready for day 3!