Mystic, Connecticut- Monday, April 10, 2017

     "Whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.  ...There is nothing surprising in this.  If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me." ...Herman Melville.

     So, the original plan was to take Scott’s folks to Long Island to visit his uncle and aunt there, while we toured around and looked at lighthouses.   But that got changed once we learned that Uncle Sonny and Aunt Delores had some appointments on the day that we were going to be there.   We had gotten the lighthouse idea into our heads, and decided to head to Connecticut instead.  It would be a little bit closer, and we wouldn’t hit New York City traffic.  Julie has never been to Connecticut, and Scott hasn’t been there since he went to New England with his family when he was still in school.

     Anna and Emma decided that they wanted to stay home and were really looking forward to having us away and being on their own.  We left some money for them to get meals with and expected Anna would be able to pick up anything that they need now that she can drive.

     We were going to leave on Monday, but were as anxious to get going as the girls were to get rid of us, so we ended up leaving at about 5:45 PM on Sunday.   Scott expected, naively, that we would find some place to stop along the way, and then have just a short drive to get to Mystic, Connecticut the next morning.  Once midnight came, he realized he should have known better.  Julie was determined to make the whole drive in one trip.    We went through Springfield Massachusetts, and passed the large round building of the Basketball Hall of Fame.  We ended up on the back roads of Connecticut, and it seemed a little spooky.  No one was out on the roads with us, and we were passing places named “Devil’s Hopyard” and “Witches Meadow Road.”  In the darkness, we saw a few opossums by the roadside and even a large statue of a dinosaur (which we later saw had Easter bunny ears on).    It was after 1:00 AM when we finally stopped at a hotel in New London, just 10 miles or so from Mystic.

     The night was short, and we got up for a good breakfast at the hotel.  Our first stop was Mystic Seaport.   Julie didn’t know what to expect and described it as a Mumford on the water, which is true.  It has a representation of buildings from a 19^th Century whaling village, complete with interpreters to explain he crafts of the time.   It is also a shipyard where work is done building and restoring wooden ships.  The Mayflower II, from Plymouth, was being worked on, although we didn’t go to see her. 

The Amistad was there-- It was built in the shipyards here for the Steven Spielberg movie about the slave ship that was taken over by the slaves themselves.  There was a Viking ship, the Drakan, with a  sea-monster/dragon head on its bow.

     Mystic Seaport is a great place to start a tour of the lighthouses of the coast of Connecticut.  Even though it doesn't have a lighthouse that actually served for navigation, it does have a recreation of a lighthouse from Nantucket.  It's small, but when you go inside it, there is are two movies to watch about the history of lighthouses in general.

     The main attractions at Mystic Seaport are the ships themselves, We went aboard the Joseph Conrad, which was built in the 1880s, but the ship that Scott wanted to see was the Charles W. Morgan, the last surviving wooden whaling ship.  When we arrived at it, there was a modern crane which was lifting one of the smaller whaling boats up onto the ship, so we couldn't get close to it right then.  That gave us a chance to hear a chantyman sing and play some music at the gazebo in the middle of town-- Scott was hoping to hear some music here.  We also got lunch at the "Galley."  It was good, but for future reference, we should eat at tavern, the Spouter, named after the one in Moby Dick,    After lunch we went back to the Morgan and were able to go aboard and search around.  Whaling is condemned as brutal today, but it was an enormously important industry to early America.  For that reason, it seems appropriate that the old ship is currenly docked near the recreation of the slave ship, Amistad.   A nearby building has an in-depth look at the history of the Morgan and the whaling industry in general.  We were impressed with the technology that they used to help interpret the story along with the many artifacts.  One globe was used as a screen to show several different stories, including the first voyage of the Morgan, and projections from within it made it a fascinating device to watch.  We saw a few of the exhibits, including one of the carved figureheads from the fronts of ships, and there was a lot more to see, but we decided that we were ready to move on.  We were both moving a little slowly-- both because we were getting tired and because of our sore legs-- so we decided to explore elsewhere.

     Julie wanted to stop in downtown Mystic to look through the shops that we passed on our way in.   She said it was more like what she was expecting—instead of Mumford on the Ocean, it was East Aurora on the Ocean.  “These are lookee shops,” she said.  They were on the expensive side, and we didn’t go in many, but we did walk down both sides of the main street and had fun looking.  Julie did buy a bracelet for herself at one shop.

    Even though we had already eaten lunch and it was too early for dinner, we had to stop at Mystic Pizza for a “slice of heaven.”  It’s the pizzeria that inspired the movie from 198* with Julia Roberts.  We’re not particularly fans of the movie—Scott doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen it—but the title has always stuck out as a unique one.  We ordered a small pizza to share, and looked at the Hollywood memorabilia on the wall.  We’re pretty sure that the place has expanded a lot since the movie was made, and they really want people to know about their association with it.  In the upstairs room where we ate, the movie is on a continual loop on the TV.  The pizza itself was pretty good, and had a unique taste, but the cheese would run off into the textured pan and it was hard to scrape it out.  Julie said it felt like we were being cheated on cheese.

     After Mystic, we drove about 20 minutes to the town of Westerly, Rhode Island.  Scott had been through Rhode Island before, but Julie never has, so we figured we’d at least drive in and say we did it.  That’s two new states for Julie on this trip.  We only drove into the town, through a strange underpass that almost wanted to be a traffic circle but wasn’t, and then made a u-turn and went back to Connecticut.  (Some of Scott’s students have come to think that he hates Rhode Island because of some jokes and examples he’s used in class, so he was looking forward to getting a picture by a “Welcome to Rhode Island” sign, but there wasn’t one that we saw.)

       We then started on what we thought would be the main activity of this trip—a tour of Connecticut’s lighthouses.  Unfortunately, Scott left the book home that we had bought to help us find them.  Luckily, we had some notes that he took on Google Docs, and we bought an even more comprehensive book when we were at Mystic Seaport.  The easternmost lighthouse in Connecticut is the Stonington Point Lighthouse.  The town is a cute little town, with lots of beautiful big old homes and very narrow streets.  The lighthouse is an old stone one, and it includes a museum run by the town historical society.  We knew it was going to be closed, but it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t open for the season until May.  In fact, if we ever do a lighthouse tour of Connecticut again, we’ll wait until May to come because that’s when the seasonal tour boats begin to take cruises out on the water to specifically view lighthouses. 

      We visited the small beach called du Bois Beach just below the Stonington lighthouse.  From there we could see the Watch Hill Lighthouse, off in the distance in Rhode Island.   In Stonington, Scott also got to see two memorials to the battle that occurred there during the War of 1812.  In August of 1814, the British had tried to land troops here, but the townspeople drove them off with cannons at what is now “Cannon Square” a few blocks above the lighthouse. 

     We set the GPS for in Julie’s phone for the next lighthouse, but we got a phone call from Anna at that point.  We had been in touch with her through the day, and knew that she hadn’t been feeling well.  She had gone to see the doctor with Noah, and learned that she had influenza.  We decided at that point that we were going to go home.  Our little trip would be cut short, but Julie wanted to be home with her now.  It was a little after 4:00 in the afternoon, and we figure that we’d be able to be home by around midnight.  At least in the light, we got to drive through some of the same places we’d seen in the darkness less than 24 hours before.