My husband and I ended up staying at the Narragansett for four nights due to our teeny apartment rental getting a bit overloaded by our teenager's friends and then by our son and friend! It turned out great. We have been renting houses on Block Island for 20 years and have never stayed several days at an inn there. The NI is quite reasonable for BI in August: $140 for a room with a shared bath (you can have a private bath for $60 more). It's also a bit rustic: the decorations in your room are likely to be kind of cheesy, the walls are a little thin, and if kids are playing on the lovely lawn (which goes right down to the water), you'll hear every word. Nevertheless....the historic inn has its charms, beginning with a spectacular porch with a spectacular view of the Great Salt Pond and all the boating going on in it. You'll be on that porch every morning for breakfast; you'll sit on it when you come back from biking or the beach; you'll have drinks and watch the sunset...it's just fabulous. The breakfast buffet, which is happily included in your room rate, was great: the first time I've ever had perfectly cooked bacon on a breakfast buffet, and it was like that every single day. Lovely pancakes. Real eggs. Good coffee. Real OJ. (The buffet was so good I never had a reason to eat the Killer Donuts available on the dock across the street and I really love them in spite of the fat content.) And that view! I took endless pictures from our first room, #10, on the third floor. I kept taking them when we had to move to #18, a corner room directly under #10 (somebody else had requested #10 for the week). Corner rooms had good cross ventilation, we noted, and we only had to use the fan one night. Beds were comfy enough, no complaints. I was a little nervous about the shared bath idea; on the second floor, six rooms share a bath. But frankly, mid-week, we never saw anybody else in the bathroom. By Thursday night, we waited one time to use it (and there's another restroom on the first floor.) So no big deal, tho I can't vouch for Friday and Saturday nights. Many people ate dinner at the inn while we were there, tho we didn't end up being able to. There is also a nice bar in the inn. Deadeye Dick's restaurant is across the street, quite good as well. The Oar restaurant is a two-minute walk away, also on the pond, and the sushi was very nicely done. The inn is about a mile from the main town area, which is the perfect length, in my opinion, for an after-dinner walk. No free wi-fi. If you're lucky enough to be there on the every-other-Tuesday-night when there's bingo at the firehouse, that's only a block away and it seems like everybody on the island shows up to play There's a TV in one of several common areas, but I rarely saw anybody in there and the TV was never on. (Everyone was on the porch or out doing something!) Payne's Dock is also next door, which has a tiny bar with some popular local entertainment (Irish singer). All in all, I'd stay at the NI again in a heartbeat.
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