R and J in the USA

We started our Connecticut journey with a struggle to get through metro New York City traffic to get there. The traffic jams on our drive from New Jersey took two hours from our first day in Connecticut, so we skipped our planned stop at Silver Sands State Park and continued on to Stony Creek, a tiny village on Long Island Sound. We found a perfect place to park that had no signs barring overnight parking and camped there for the night. We did our best to cool down from what had now been weeks of fairly punishing heat inside our house on wheels, a glorified human-sized slow cooker. Having put “air conditioner” on the list of van upgrades we had decided against when weighing various options against our budget, we were quickly ready to revisit that decision. Luckily, our ceiling fans kept it plenty cool at night.

In morning’s light, we enjoyed this charming waterside town as the backdrop for our early day activities. We hopped on the delightfully quaint Thimble Island Ferry, a generous term for what turned out to be a small motor boat with a sea captain. But it did the job that ferries do and ferried us out across the waters amongst the Thimble Islands to an island destination we were looking forward to discovering. We soon arrived on Outer Island, one of the many Thimble Islands occupied only by a solitary house. Outer Island, however, was the only one open to the public. It was generously donated by its original owner upon her passing to the National Wildlife Service to become a wildlife refuge and a place for visitors to enjoy. We spent the second half of our morning on bare rocks open to the sea and sky next to the wild birds. 

We made our way to New Haven, a town Julie only just barely remembered from a summer theater program at Yale she attended some thirty years prior. When passing a bookshop, Julie had flashes of that building being a WaWa convenience store when she was there as a 17-year-old. She went into the bookshop to ask if it used to be a WaWa, and was delighted when the shopkeeper confirmed that indeed it had been…long ago. That’s a moment. When you realize you are more than old enough to have memories from thirty years ago. We walked through the Yale campus with our mouths agape and our minds agog at the sheer scale of the buildings. The architecture was at a level we had not yet seen, and we had already seen plenty of great buildings. We walked by a theater and there was a show that just happened to be starting. We said, “Let’s do it!” Having studied theater on this campus so many years ago, it seemed an appropriate homage to Julie’s theatrical memories from so long ago to attend a show. The show was an acrobatic interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, and it was a blast.

We sent a very last minute text to our dear friend Katy, who lived in the area, to see if she was down for some visitors, which is code for, “Can we use you for your indoor plumbing? Shower, toilet, laundry – the whole lot?” As a side bonus, it was great to see her and visit. After a nice Thai food outing and a kind offer to sleep indoors that we turned down (because Julie is irrationally 100% committed to 10 months in the van), we had a lovely evening sleeping in the parking lot outside of her apartment.

The next morning we said our farewells to Katy and headed over to the GRR Firecracker 5K (you can read about that in our 5K section). After the race, we hit a bakery that would make Leo’s Bakery blush (a sensational bakery near our house in East Rochester, NY) then toured the Mark Twain house, where Julie had to be pulled out of yet another enticing gift shop. We waved at the Harriet Beecher Stowe house just down the road without time to explore it and then we were off to the state capitol building in Hartford…on a Saturday. Oops. Our first significant itinerary blunder, we realized we would be visiting no state museum or getting inside of a capitol building in Connecticut, as they were closed on weekends. Definitely a bummer. Alas. We walked around the outside of the state capitol and, yet again, found ourselves agape and agog at the sheer size, scope, and scale of an architectural masterpiece. We had already found that each capitol building was built to impress and successfully does so, but none we had previously visited had hit us as hard as this one. We read what plaques we could on the grounds surrounding the capitol and moved on along our way.

We made a beeline toward what, to us, had always been the most famous town in Connecticut, thanks to the glory that is 80’s cinema. Good old Mystic. We ate at Mystic Pizza, of course, and were not disappointed. Julie found a donut shop that had gluten free donuts. She was so excited that she actively decided not to ask if they were also dairy free. Ignorance is donut bliss and she promptly purchased and pounded a handful of gluten free donut holes and let her stomach inform her later…definitely not dairy free. #soworthit.

While we would have loved to stay and visit the maritime museum in Mystic, we were, once again, up against the clock, and thus had to bid adieu to another wonderful state to which we wouldn’t mind returning. We soon enough realized we’d have to, since it became the second state where we forgot to get a picture of the state sign on our way in. With a capitol building, a state sign and a bike ride all remaining unchecked on our state-by-state list of to do’s, we’ll happily return to what this lovely New England state has to offer sometime in the future. For now, we bid adieu to Connecticut as we travel merrily along.