Visiting hours

Driving into Rhode Island is anticlimactic. The ocean part of the Ocean State is nowhere near the highway, until you get to Providence. Otherwise, nothing stands out in the landscape. We have no Gateway Arch, Golden Gate Bridge or Statue of Liberty to speak of and even the Big Blue Bug is a 40-minute drive from the southern border (and 20 minutes from the north). The only clues that you've crossed into Rhode Island are a couple of road signs, a pothole or two and the tidy R.I. Welcome Center in the pines of Richmond, located off I-95 before Exit 3.
During a recent visit, a woman who worked on staff but didn't want to be identified said the question most commonly asked by tourists is, "How do I get to Newport from here?" Those looking for information about South County are mostly interested in "beaches and seafood." Summer is the busiest season for vacationers, while truckers make up the bulk of visitors in fall and winter. "You'd be surprised to know how many truckers don't know where they're going," said the unnamed source, Deep Tourist.
Counters built into the doorway keep a running tally of all visitors. Hand-scrawled grids, recording the data for last year, indicated an 11-month total of 377,538 walk-ins. (The page for the August count was missing the day this reporter dropped by. Deep Tourist had no explanation for this, but was confident that the page would turn up eventually.)
"One question we hear all the time is 'How come Rhode Island is called Rhode Island' if it's not an island," Deep Tourist said. "So we inform them that the state's official name is actually the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and that the Rhode Island part is actually Aquidneck Island, where Newport is, and the Providence Plantations part is everything else, which confuses them even more. But if they ask why it's called the Ocean State, all we have to do is show them a map, and they go quiet when they see all that blue."