The Afternoon Teas At This Manse In Bristol Are This Summer's Hot Tix
After scrolling thru some FB memories of summer days past at Blithewold — the gardens at that 33 acre estate have been singled out by Yankee Magazine as some of the Best Public Gardens in New England and are in fact super famous in certain circles because they date back to the turn of the century and include rare trees from Europe, China & Japan — in Bristol, I hopped on their site the other night to see what they had going on this summer.
Well, turns out their Tea & Scones, on the porch overlooking Narragansett Bay, could be one of the most sought after tickets of 2021.
The Golden Tickets of the kickoff of our Roaring 20’s, if you will.
I kid you not!
June is completely sold out and July is on its way there too.
Of course this only made me more frantic while navigating the event site and upcoming dates last night.
I was desperately trying to find a day and time in the not-too-distant future that had open tables.
Photo Courtesy Of The Blithewold Instagram
Well, I finally secured a table for mid July and pretty jazzed about it. Frankly it’s the closest I’m gonna get to an English countryside style experience this year. (For the record, even though editors at Graydon Carter’s Airmail have said The Cotswolds is so three years ago, it is still on my personal travel wish list.)
In addition to the traditional menu for a high tea (actually you can get your tea iced which is probably not the way it rolls at Balmoral, Clarence House, or Kensington Palace but whatevs), my friend K.G. and I are looking forward to touring the seven (7) gardens on the property.
The Rose Garden alone can be traced back to 1900 (!!!) and includes a certain variety of rose that historians believe could have originated at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s Virginia estate that apparently has bragging rights as ‘the most visited’ property of it’s kind in the continental U.S..
Ohhh, the history!
In case of rain, everything will move indoors which is a-okay with me because sipping tea in a beautifully preserved 45 room mansion built in the early 1900’s sounds dreamy! (The original structure burned in 1906; the current one is the 2nd or Blithewold II as it’s called on their web site.)
To try your luck at getting a table for you and up to three of your fave peeps, go to Blithewold.org/event/tea-scones/.
As always, if you are victorious in getting seats after reading THIS, please let the powers that be know that you found out about the event via Patty J and PattyJ.com.