The Breakers is a mansion in Newport that’s twice as big as the Mountain View city hall. It got its name from being right on the coast, so if you were on the porch, you could hear the waves breaking on the nearby cliffs. It has about 43 bedrooms and 20 bathrooms, with 40 assorted staff. You know, footmen and butlers and cooks and things. The kitchen alone was bigger than our house in California. At one of the parties hosted there, John F. Kennedy and his wife were the guests of honor.

A photo of The Breakers library (from Wikipedia).

Some rooms in this house seemed needlessly pricey. For instance, the library, which was quite nice, was built of Russian mahogany, Spanish leather, and gold. The bathtubs had four taps. Two of course, made hot and cold water come out, but, since the mansion was coastal, the other two made hot and cold saltwater come out, because saltwater was thought to be good for you. Also, the bathtubs were such thick marble, you had to fill them up four times before they were warm enough to use!

Syndicated from Soren’s Realm.

Recently we acquired a GoPro HERO4, and mounted it to do a time-lapse while we went through the Cape Cod Canal. The canal reminds me of a road, because there is a red/green traffic light at the entrance. Right at the beginning there was a big rainstorm that lasted maybe 8 minutes. The white flashes you’ll notice after the rainstorm is Dad wiping the GoPro with a lens cloth. We made a top speed of 9.5 knots! To achieve this fantastic speed, we had to time it perfectly, so the current shoved us down the canal, and so we weren’t fighting the current. This has been the fastest we have ever gone during the entire trip so far. The time-lapse turned out pretty nicely, even though the battery died before we finished:

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Today we aimed to do an all day passage. It started with an early start. (Duh.) Followed by a boring school day, featuring math, science, and many more all-new dumb features, including editing blog posts, minimal reading time during school, and zero fun. (Minus art. Art’s fun.) Anyway, we succeeded in the all day passage part. A little more than halfway through, when we were about to go under a bridge, dad sensibly thought to double-check the bridge height on the chart. When doing this, he realized that the bridge height was only 39 ft, when EXIT was 63 ft. He quickly turned around and redid the route so we didn’t go through those dang bridges, and by this “little” mistake, he added 2 hrs. to our already long trip. But accidents happen, no? [Editor’s note: Yes, route-planning mistakes were made, though I prefer to think of them as “non-catastrophic learning opportunities”. -dw] When we got there, we saw the acclaimed “Mile Long Beach.” This made the long journey worth it. It was beautiful. All white sand, another when you anchor there, you hear the waves crashing. Slowly rising, peaking, and dying out, this beatiful white noise occurred about every 5 seconds.

The beach at Roque.

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Today we went swimming. It was totally awesome! The water was about 70 degrees, and there was a tiny little dock-type thing that my dad’s friend owned, and said we could swim on it. It was really cool, and, underneath it, there was a little space in between those floaty things on all docks that a kid could fit into if he knew how to tread water. If not, there were some boards that you could hang on to and not have to swim at all, just hang there. Also, we recently acquired an inflatable paddleboard.

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Doesn’t that sound that sound like a C. S. Lewis chapter title? Anyway, a few days ago (and on many other days) I went to an island, and as we were coming in to a natural dinghy harbor, I found a peninsula. This peninsula was covered in ducks. As we entered, all the ducks flew off. I immediately christened it “Duck Rock.” I found that, during high tide, Duck Rock was small and inaccessible by land. In between low and high tide, it was slightly bigger, and you could get to it by wading. During low tide, well, I wouldn’t say it’s big, because that would be lying, but it is compared to high tide. Also, during low tide, you can get there without getting even your feet wet. After that we went swimming.

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