Connecticut - Constitution State
We started our visit to Connecticut by exploring the Litchfield Hills. We had no idea that so much of Connecticut is rural, and incredibly beautiful. Hiking paths, waterfalls, and charming towns full of colonial history. We stayed at the Boulders Inn in New Preston in the Township of Washington, so named to honor George Washington who traveled through this area several times during the Revolutionary War. We stopped to take a picture of a historic covered bridge, the West Cornwall Bridge in Sharon, which was constructed in 1841. We just don’t have these in California!
We thoroughly enjoyed our visit to The Mark Twain House, a National Historic Landmark, in Hartford. Twain lived, wrote and raised his family there from 1874 to 1891, which he called the happiest years of his life. It was a very productive time for him, as he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn during this period. The house itself is a 19-room Tiffany-decorated mansion and our tour guide entertained us with many Mark Twain anecdotes and sayings.
We were fans of the movie Mystic Pizza, starring Julia Roberts, so of course we had to stay there and have dinner at the real-life pizza parlor where the movie was filmed. Mystic is located on the Connecticut coast and Mystic Seaport Museum was both educational and lots of fun. It included a village where trade shops and businesses from the 1800s were transported from various locations in New England. In the Shipyard, we watched craftsmen practicing the nearly lost art of wooden shipbuilding.
Before leaving Connecticut, we took a student-guided tour of Yale University in New Haven. I had been there before, but Andy had never seen the campus, which is glorious in classic Gothic architectural style. Unfortunately, our tour guide was, well, quite full of himself and I could see how the students and parents also on the tour were turned off by his attitude. As an integral part of my career, much of which involved college admission counseling, I have taken literally hundreds of student-guided tours, and this was one of the worst. I remember saying to Andy that if I had a college, I would carefully choose my tour guides to make sure they didn’t create a negative, false impression.
Connecticut is a small state, but we felt we gained some understanding of its history and culture by spending time in the countryside, in Hartford, its largest city, at Yale University, and in the seaport village of Mystic, which was founded in 1654 and quicky rose to prominence as a shipbuilding center in the clipper ship era.
