No. 615 – Marquis of Spades

Performer: Smashing Pumpkins

Songwriter: Billy Corgan

Original Release: Zero Single

Year: 1996

Definitive Version: None

After we left Cooperstown on our New England odyssey in the fall of 1996, Debbie and I headed for the coast. Boston was next on the agenda.

As we got closer, I decided to take a side trip to Rhode Island. If you want to hit all 50 states, you have to make it to Rhode Island at some point, of course. But Rhode Island isn’t like Delaware. Delaware is conveniently located so if you drive from New York City to Washington, D.C., you go through it. I stopped for gasoline in 1991, so that counts.

Rhode Island is a bit more of a commitment. You don’t have to drive through it to get from New York City to Boston, and on that same 1991 trip (details to come), I went through Connecticut and turned north from Hartford into Massachusetts, bypassing Rhode Island completely.

But I had more of an agenda than just merely passing through. I thought we’d drive to Newport, which was supposed to be cool. Debbie liked the idea, so we veered a bit from our agenda. All we had to do was arrive in Boston that night. It didn’t matter when we arrived.

We got to Newport late in the afternoon due to some pretty heavy traffic on the two-lane highway from Providence, and we proceeded directly to the Cliff Walk, which Debbie knew about. It was a path along the shore and took you past all of these mansions that were built by the titans of the Gilded Age.

Honestly, to call those houses mansions would be a bit like calling the Sears Tower a building: They fit the basic definition of the word, but it didn’t do them justice. These bordered on castles, and each one was bigger and more opulent than the last. In fact, one was so massive it had been converted to a college with no change to the exterior.

We couldn’t make the whole hike, because the path was under construction and the sun was setting, but I was able to take a picture of the house they used for The Great Gatsby (the Redford version). Afterward, we stopped at a bar downtown for a quick bite and agreed that it was with regret that we couldn’t stay longer. It was another location that we left for “next time.”

We spent only two nights and one day in Boston, so, of course, we didn’t have time to see a game. (I had already done that anyway.) Instead we did the whole historical tourist thing, starting early in the morning at the tall ship the USS Constitution before making the walking tour of the North Church, Bunker Hill and the area where Paul Revere’s house still stands. I’d already been to Philadelphia, so seeing Boston made for a nice American Revolution bookend.

We finished our walking tour downtown at the Commons and had a drink at the Bull and Finch Pub—aka, the Cheers bar. I snapped a picture of me holding a foamy B outside for Scott, who was a huge fan of the show.

I don’t recall our dinner that night, but I remember the lunch that day. While we were making our walking tour, we stumbled upon a restaurant in the Little Italy section, near to the Revere house, called Florentine. We had incredible lobster ravioli for lunch. That was a nice warmup for the next destination in our journey: Maine.