An Imperfect Trip to Newport

From solo traveler to toddler wrangler

Hi friends! You may have noticed this newsletter has been a bit sporadic lately. With my daughter at home full-time this summer, I just haven’t been able to show up here as much as I’d like. So, I’m going to take the next 6 weeks off from Wild Writing. I do have one more Q&A with a wonderful and insightful writer to share in that time, but otherwise, I’ll be taking these weeks to have some more summer adventures with my family and think about how to show up fully for this newsletter when I return. I’ll also be sharing some old posts that most of you probably haven’t read since I wrote them years ago, before you subscribed! I hope you’ll stick around for those. And thanks so much for being patient with me. I hope you, too, can take a step back from projects when it feels right.

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“Valet” is not a word that exists in my regular life. I do not typically go to restaurants that offer valet, let alone choose to pay for it. So when I turned up the swooping road that leads to Castle Hill Inn in Newport, Rhode Island, I panicked a little. Up ahead I could see one of those little booths at the entrance to the parking lot, with two sharply dressed young men smiling at me through the rain-smeared windshield. It seemed valet was complimentary for everyone dining at the restaurant.

I know how to play rich for the day—that’s no problem. I love an occasional splurge, especially when it comes to food. But I suddenly felt uneasy arriving at this grand establishment on a hill overlooking Narraganset Bay because my daughter and I were windblown and rain splattered. Our jeans were crusted with sand from the shins down, having just returned from a romp on a rainy beach. We were not dressed for this kind of place.

Lunch at Castle Hill Inn is a plan. You probably make a reservation, put it on your calendar, and plan your day around being hungry and well-ironed by the time you arrive. Maybe you have a tradition of coming here every year, and you always take photos with your family on the pristine rolling lawn.

But traveling with a toddler means making plans and then admiring how they look when torn into little pieces and tossed into the air like confetti—along with whatever food she just threw. On the first night of this three-day trip, I barely intercepted an oyster shell from sailing across a crowded dining room.

That morning I’d chased her from room to room at Newport’s local aquarium, fish tanks and information about the bay’s plant and animal life blurring through my periphery while I wondered what I might learn if she’d stop moving for 30 seconds. But then we oo’ed and ahhh’ed at a sea turtle and got to touch a little shark and that was pretty cool. (What kind of shark? Great question.)

Now here we were for lunch, straight from the beach she didn’t want to leave, even when the rain turned sideways. I had to promise her some kind of dessert to get her back in the car to come here, and now she was snoring in the back seat. But I heard Castle Hill makes one of the best lobster rolls in town, and I needed to try it. Nap time be damned.

I took a deep breath as we rolled to a stop, told the valet it was going to take a minute to gather the sleeping child plus all of our stuff and perhaps I should park myself(??), and then I breathed a sigh of relief when he told me to pull over and take my time. They’d park the car whenever I was ready.

I unfolded the snoring Fi from her carseat like the heaviest rag doll; she plopped on my shoulder and kept on sleeping.

I knew that bringing my three-year-old daughter on a trip to Newport, Rhode Island—just the two of us—would be a challenge. I knew it would be an exhausting mix of fun and fatigue, the thrill of watching her discover new sights and sounds along with the humbling realities of the occasional tantrum. But we took her out of daycare this summer. Works been slow, and we’re saving a lot of money by keeping her home for a few months.

Which means the work I do have—or the things I might try to write about by getting out of the house and having new experiences like this one—have all been smashed between the demands of parenting, every new idea and hurried email speckled with cracker dust and the fear that I’m not paying enough attention to her or my work.

I’d never spent a night in a new place with her on my own before. I told myself this trip would, at the very least, be an interesting challenge. Surely, it would be something to write about.

Fi is at an age where she desperately wants more independence, and can do a lot of things herself, but in a way that is ineffective, slow, and oftentimes leads to something breaking or spilling and then tears. So escorting her around a new city was a game of close inspection, scanning rooms, menus, surfaces, vibes, doors that lead to busy streets—constantly gauging how long this or that place might keep her occupied and how annoyed the other people would be if she suddenly started to scream, which she sometimes does out of nowhere.

At The Sailing Museum, for example, she thrashed in her stroller while I fumbled for our tickets to the entrance, demanding to be released because she could see toys in the gift shop near the entrance. I barely heard the explanation of how our wrist bands would allow us to pick a style of boat to “sail” at various interactive exhibitions by scanning a QR code on our wristbands. But then there were oars to pull on and steering wheels to turn and screens with rocking waves to watch and eventually we had some kind of fun before I caved and bought her a shark notebook and crayons from the gift shop.

When we later braved the cliff walk, a gravel and concrete path that winds between the Newport mansions and the bay, she needed a goldfish handed to her every ten paces or so. She’s almost too big for the backpack I had her in, but we sang songs and she waved and said “HIIIIiiiiii” to every single person that passed us. The challenge of needing to finish two miles between potty breaks made it a great workout.

The type of attention required when traveling with a toddler is very different than than the kind I wrapped around my mostly-solo trips for many years. Showing up in a new place on my own was a big part of my traveler-identity. The long walks across new cities, the quiet hikes, the hours spent in coffee shops and bars, people watching and scribbling in notebooks—these are the activities that let me sink into a place, the kind that let my travel-planning anxieties fall through the cracks of a low-stakes day.

But there is no sitting quietly with a toddler anywhere. There is certainly no sitting with your thoughts. There is only sitting with both hands up, ready to gently deflect smaller hands from water glasses and steak knives and fumbling for whatever toy made it into the oversized bag that’s giving you back problems and hoping it will hold her attention long enough to take a bite of a burger.

It’s so, so exhausting.

When I find time to read lately, I’ve been gravitating to nature books framed by personal narratives. (Right now, I’m on Is a River Alive by Robert McFarlane.) This genre is so rich in detail and texture, the authors somehow managing to fold in a master’s degree in local ecology of whatever place they’re writing about, while also discussing some parallel theme and a story of their life that carries the reader through a place while picking up pieces of history, politics, or cultural criticism along the way—maybe all three. I love these books, and I read them in the early mornings, before my daughter wakes up. I also wonder, how many hands do these writers have? Are their eyes and ears better tuned than mine to pick up and remember these details? Because these days I’m lucky if I remember the hotel key card.

But here I was, looking out over a green lawn and gray sky, enjoying the quietest corner of a famous dining establishment with my daughter in my arms. I could still feel the ocean on my skin.

I thought about the beach, and all the rocks she’d been climbing over, how she inspected the surface of each one, bending down to scratch and pick at different colors and textures, collecting a few rocks and shells. While I watched her, she took it all in. She splashed in the surf and giggled when the sand slurped against her little feet as the tide pulled out. She’d squealed at seagulls and sandpipers. She’d waved at the lone surfer bobbing on mostly flat water. I wonder if she knew that speck of slick black was a person in a wetsuit and not a shiny black bird. She’d wave at either.

I’m not able to soak in the scenery the way I used to. But there’s an evolving vividness to these experiences, one in which her perspective adds depth to my own. When my eyes are tired from watching her and my arms are tired from carrying her, she’s charged up by the place I’ve brought her to. She’s still absorbing everything.

My lobster roll arrived quickly. It was delicious, and Fi woke up after a few bites. And then, for maybe the first time in the last year of her short life, she sat quietly on my lap, munching on french fries and staring out the fogged up window; we could barely see the sea. It was a simple moment that ended too soon. But for now, it was exactly what we both needed.

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