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2020 Top Placements LOBSTER ROLL PILGRIMAGE NANTUCKET CHIC GREAT Rhode Island's icon served str S WHARF Patrick's flagship store in Newport "WE LOVE IT. WE NEVER WANT TO LEAVE. IT'S WHAT YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU IMAGINE A CLASSIC AMERICAN SUMMER." -KIEL JAMES PATRICK and seasoning that is practically the state dish. "Soupy" is soppressata, a dry-cured Italian sausage infused with cayenne, paprika, and this is key-Rhode Island salt air, first made by immigrants who moved from Calabria, Italy, to Westerly, now. considered the soupy capital of the world. The Westerly Pack- ing Company, an Italian grocery and sausage factory about 10 miles inland, supplies the Weekapaug Inn. (It's worth a detour- especially if you get fifth-generation sausage maker Bruno Trombino to show you the soupy drying room.) Weekapaug serenity is seductive, but I want to check out upscale Watch Hill, which in its Victorian-era heyday had seven grand hotels. Only two remain, including the canary-yellow. Ocean House, lavishly and lovingly resurrected in 2010. I walk from the hotel past Taylor Swift's blufftop mansion and down to cove-hugging Bay Street, bookended by the vintage Flying Horse Carousel, in operation since 1883, and a dockside Lily Pulitzer store. In the century-old Olympia Tea Room, I take note of the TEMPERANCE sign over the marble bar and order a beer anyway "And stuffies, please," I add with enough insouciance, I hope, to mask the fact that I've just learned what they are. JAMES PATRIC in the clear green-blue water and gawk at the mansions on the bluffs above us. The waterways and coves feel secret, the vistas near-magical. Almost like-yes-something out of a movie. Back on land, I head to broad Easton's Beach, popular with families, surfers, and socialites not only for its waves, but for two malinam landmale Pineta halahtlua intad toucle nafasian COAST LIVIN SPOILS OF THE KINGDOM Discover only-in-Rhode Island tastes and treasures along the way at these classic spots. STUFFIES Olympia Tea Room, open seasonally at 74 Bay Street Watch Hill CLAMCAKES Flo's Clam Shack, open seasonally in two locations on Aquidneck Island Wave Avenue Middletown, and 324 Park Avenue, Portsmouth ON VACATIONSUNRISE AMERICA'S Best Beaches 12 SECRETS OF SUMMERHOUSE STYLE PAGE 86 SUNRISE SUNRISE With its magical landscapes and quirky culture, Rhode Island's coast is straight from a movie. MEG LUKENS NOONAN sets out to discover its secrets Photography by JULIEN CAPMEIL KINGDOM KINGDOM KINGDOM House lawn Soft Frozen EMONADE $3.00 small $3.50 medium $4.25 $4.75 large jumbo I WASN'T ALL THAT SURPRISED TO SEE WILD RABBITS STANDING AT ATTENTION WHILE REVEILLE SOUNDED ON NEWPORT'S CASTLE HILL. I'd been walking to a lighthouse above the sea-splashed rocks. of Narragansett Bay when the nearby Coast Guard station's morning call began. Just ahead, in a slash of sunlight, two cottontails rose to their hind legs, held still as sentries while. the bugle played and then darted into a thicket of wild rose. Natural behavior? Could be. But in my few days of traveling Rhode Island's meandering coastline, I'd learned that, in these parts, enchantment is everywhere. Maybe the roots of that wonderment can be traced to the tiny state's long history as a refuge for dreamers. Tucked between t Massachusetts to its north and east, Connecticut to its west, and nearly cleaved from the south by the insistent wedge of island-studded Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island has attracted freethinkers since the 1630s when Roger Williams and Anne. Hutchinson, both banished from more conservative Massa- chusetts Bay Colony, separately founded settlements there on near-utopian principles. Alas, that anything-goes mentality bred scoundrels too; rum runners, slave traders, and robber barons helped earn the state its nickname, Rogue's Island. I've lived most of my life in New England, but knew little about this smallest tile in the regional mosaic. Sure, I've seen movie-set Newport-the Gilded Age mansions, the whippet- sleek yachts. But I missed what I suspected was the essence of the state: the kind of dreamy landscapes-tide-bent cordgrass and tiny coves, fogbound beacons and flinty bluffs-that film- maker Wes Anderson showcased in Moonrise Kingdom, his quirky coming-of-age 2012 film set in a scout camp and shot. mostly on islands in Narragansett Bay. I wanted to explore that cinematic shoreline. Starting with a pair of historic beachside enclaves in the state's southwestern corner, I laid a plan to make my way cast to a hilltop castle at the tip of Aquidneck Island, then head to a Lilliputian hamlet on the southeasternmost border-so private it might have been overlooked except for one 20 COASTAL LIVING Summer 2030 The beach at Weekapaug inn storybook hotel made entirely of stone. Along the way, I'd seek out foods that insiders say exist only in Rhode Island-things I'd heard of, like legends almost, some as endearingly oddball as a Wes Anderson flick. ACT ONE: WEEKAPAUG My shore-hugging odyssey begins in Weekapaug, a seaside com- munity that, like Watch Hill, its fancier sister down the road, is officially part of the town of Westerly, Rhode Island. Weekapaug consists of a cluster of summer homes; some are grand and gabled with wraparound porches and manicured lawns, others cottagey and bordered by freeform tangles of honeysuckle. Most. are still owned by descendants of their original builders who were lured by the area's pristine barrier beach and sparkling salt pond-both as appealing now as they were when visitors first arrived in the 19th century. The outsider's ticket to this insular haven is the Weekapaug Inn. The rambling, shingled inn was built on the pond's western shore in 1939 after a cataclysmic hurricane in 1938 destroyed the original beachfront lodge. That epic storm, so powerful it regis- tered on a seismograph in Alaska, leveled nearly every structure: on the coast and killed some 600 people. (There were miracu- lous stories of survival, too: Two babies were found alive on a floating door; another family rode their battered house across the tempest-tossed bay) Renovated in 2012, the inn has the trappings of a smart coastal hotel-understated neutrals, Audubon prints, wicker chaises in which to sip one's gimlet. But underneath beats the heart of a sleepaway camp, thanks in large part to Captain Mark Bullinger, the inn's khaki cargo shorts-wearing naturalist and de facto scoutmaster. It's choppy out on Quonochontaug Pond, but Captain Mark is dauntless, steering the 24-foot Quonnie Queen, with its fluttering navy blue awning and gleaming teak deck, into the freshening breeze. The boyish 59-year-old knows these waters well. He spent childhood summers at his grandfather's place in SIBLEY HELD GUIDE TO BIRD At Weekapaug: birding tools (top); murels in the lobby, (above); Mark Bullinger on the Queanie Queen AC Hea Bay Wookapaug Inn Stunning views of the Atlantic Ocean from Newport's Castle Hill Inn