There is a particular kind of traveler — and I suspect you know one, or are one — who will spend months planning a trip to the south of France and drive past some of the most beautiful coastline in the world without stopping. The Northeast has a proximity problem. It’s too close to feel like a destination. Too familiar to feel like a discovery.
That’s a mistake worth correcting.
Within a few hours of Philadelphia, Boston, or New York, there are places that would stop you cold if you encountered them in a travel magazine with a European dateline. A harbor town in Maine that has been quietly getting everything right for decades. A Rhode Island village so small and so beautiful that most people outside New England have never heard of it. A Gilded Age city that gets treated like a day trip and deserves a week. If you haven’t looked closely at your own backyard lately, these three are a good place to start.
Kennebunkport, Maine
Kennebunkport has a way of exceeding expectations even for people who already expect a great deal from it. The harbor, the shingle-style houses along the water, the particular quality of Maine light on a clear morning — it delivers all of it, and then the food turns out to be better than you anticipated, and the inn is more beautiful than the photographs suggested, and you find yourself extending the trip by a day because leaving feels wrong.
It’s a small town, which means you walk everywhere and that’s the point. Dock Square is the center of things — boutiques, galleries, the kind of shops that have been there long enough to know what they’re doing. The rocky coastline and the beaches are both within easy reach, and they’re entirely different experiences that somehow coexist peacefully within the same few miles.
Go in May before Memorial Day or in September after Labor Day. The town is still fully open, the clam shacks are back in business, and a reservation is still a thing you can get on short notice.
Stay
The White Barn Inn is the standard by which other Maine inns measure themselves — a Auberge Resorts property with one of the best restaurants in New England attached to it. The Captain Lord Mansion is a Federal-style sea captain’s home turned inn that does the period details with genuine care rather than theme-park fussiness. Hidden Pond, a mile or so outside of town, takes a different approach entirely — private bungalows in the woods, a farm-to-table kitchen, a spa that earns its reputation. Three very different properties, all within the same small orbit.
Eat
The White Barn Inn dining room is the occasion meal — prix fixe, candlelit, in a converted barn that is one of the more beautiful restaurant spaces in the country. Earth at Hidden Pond for farm-driven cooking that takes the Maine pantry seriously. Alisson’s for a lobster roll at a picnic table with a view of the harbor, which is sometimes exactly the right answer and requires no apology.
See
Walk the Marginal Way in nearby Ogunquit — a mile-long cliff path above the Atlantic that is one of the quieter pleasures of the Maine coast and somehow remains relatively undiscovered. St. Anthony’s Monastery and its grounds, which most visitors drive past without knowing they’re there. And simply: the harbor at low tide on a May morning, when the boats are sitting on their moorings and the light is doing something specific to the water that only happens this far north.
Newport, Rhode Island
Newport gets treated like a day trip from Boston or Providence, which is one of the more persistent mistakes in Northeast travel. The Gilded Age mansions alone justify two days. Add the Cliff Walk, the harbor, the food scene that has grown considerably in the past decade, and the sailing culture that gives the whole city its particular energy, and you have something that deserves to be taken much more seriously than a detour.
The mansions are the obvious starting point and they’re obvious for good reason — The Breakers, Marble House, Rosecliff. These are not houses. They are statements of ambition built in marble and gilt by people who had more money than the country had seen before and wanted everyone to know it. Walking through them is a particular kind of education in American history that no textbook quite replicates.
But Newport beyond the mansions is worth equal time. Thames Street and Bellevue Avenue for the shops and galleries. The harbor for the sailing culture that has been the city’s heartbeat since the America’s Cup. The Naval War College Museum for context on why Newport mattered strategically as well as socially. May brings the Newport Flower Show, which is exactly what it sounds like and worth planning around.
Stay
Bellevue House is the newest serious entry — a boutique property on Bellevue Avenue that puts you in the mansion district without the scale of a large hotel. The Vanderbilt, Auberge Resorts Collection, occupies a Gilded Age mansion on the avenue and does it with the level of finish you’d expect from Auberge. For something with more history and slightly less polish, the Hotel Viking has been on the hill above town since 1926 and remains the most recognizably Newport of the options.
Eat
Fluke Wine Bar & Kitchen for the best view of the harbor and a raw bar that earns the setting. The Dining Room at Castle Hill Inn, perched on a point above the water, for a meal that takes full advantage of the location — this is the occasion dinner in Newport, and the drive out to the inn is part of the experience. Stoneacre Pantry on Thames for a more casual lunch that takes local sourcing more seriously than the setting suggests.
See
Walk the Cliff Walk — three and a half miles along the Atlantic with the mansion backyards on one side and the ocean on the other, and no fee to do it. Fort Adams State Park for sailing culture and harbor views and the occasional summer concert series. The International Tennis Hall of Fame, which is housed in a Newport Casino that is itself a masterpiece of Gilded Age architecture, and which earns a visit even from people who don’t follow the sport.
Watch Hill, Rhode Island
Most people haven’t heard of Watch Hill. That is almost entirely the point.
At the southwestern tip of Rhode Island, where the coast turns and faces Block Island Sound, Watch Hill is the kind of place that people who know about it have quietly kept to themselves for generations. A small Victorian village, a lighthouse, a carousel that has been running since 1867, and one of the great small luxury hotels on the East Coast. The beach — Misquamicut and the Watch Hill shoreline — is among the most beautiful on the New England coast and has none of the density that plagues the more famous stretches.
It is genuinely small. There is not a lot to do in the way that some travelers measure doing. That is a feature, not a limitation. Watch Hill is for people who want to be somewhere beautiful and quiet and feel no pressure to account for their time. Those people tend to return every year for the rest of their lives.
Stay
The Ocean House is the reason to go. A complete rebuild of the original 1868 hotel, it reopened in 2010 with every amenity a serious luxury property requires — spa, multiple dining options, private beach access, rooms that look directly at the water — while managing to feel like a place with genuine history rather than a new construction pretending to have one. It is one of the finest hotels in New England, and it is largely unknown outside the region.
Eat
The Seasons at the Ocean House is the dining room, and it earns the setting — New England seafood and locally sourced ingredients in a room with views that make the food taste better than it already does. Olympia Tea Room on Bay Street is the local institution, open since 1916, where the lobster roll and the chowder have been good for longer than most restaurants have existed. For something simpler, the Cooked Goose is a breakfast and lunch spot with no pretensions and a loyal following for good reason.
See
Walk to the Watch Hill Lighthouse, which has been marking the point since 1856 and which offers one of the better views of the Rhode Island coast on a clear day. Ride the Flying Horse Carousel — the oldest continuously operating merry-go-round in the country, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely moving. And simply: sit on the porch of the Ocean House in the late afternoon with something cold and watch the light change over the water. That’s the whole argument for Watch Hill, and it’s a good one.
The Northeast has been hiding in plain sight. If any of these three feel like something you’ve been meaning to get to — or something you didn’t know you were missing — I’d love to help you put it together properly. Let’s chat.
