Baby-friendly vacations bring nightmare scenarios to mind: bland all-inclusives, mid-flight meltdowns, and being relegated to properties that are the hotel equivalent of a high chair—functional, generic, and easy to wipe down in the (inevitable) case of a mess. After the birth of our first child and months of putting our usual routine of multiple long-haul trips a year on hold, my husband and I were starting to get cabin fever. I started wistfully musing about the woman we saw breastfeeding her 3-month-old in the middle of the W Trek in Patagonia’s Torres del Paine and the British couple we met in Marrakesh with a newborn happily resting in a carrier on his mother’s chest. Then I remembered that until very recently, I got stressed taking our little guy on the subway. It was a time for a trip. But we needed to start small.
We had a few conditions: within driving distance, an interesting location but not overwhelming, a hotel we’d have stayed in pre-baby (read: no bland big chains), and somewhere that seemed “family-friendly”—whatever that meant. We went back and forth, but ended up settling on Newport, Rhode Island. We endured a bit of ribbing from friends about taking an infant to Gilded Age mansions, but it turns out that choosing Newport was the first thing we got right while planning our inaugural family getaway.
