The Puffins have been located and viewed so now it’s on to the next item on our respective “bucket lists”! Long Island is next on H’s list!
Thursday morning we headed south down Rt1 and took the side route 9 that took us thru all the quaint fishing/tourist towns including Kennebunkport. We even parked the van and walked a few blocks and shopped in a few of the pretty little shops that lined the main street. One of the interesting things we noticed along the back roads in Maine is that a lot of the old farmhouses had their barns attached right to them. It sure must have made it easier to get to the horses and livestock in the barn during the cold and deep snow of winter. So . . . this must have been the original “attached garage”??!!
Back on Rt1, H put the pedal to the metal and moved to Interstate 95 (yep – it runs from Maine all the way to Miami Florida!) and only stopped at a seaside state park in New Hampshire for a picnic lunch. From there it was straight thru Boston Massachusetts in bumper-to-bumper traffic, thru Providence Rhode Island and on to Mystic Connecticut.
We had visited Mystic Seaport several (OK- many) years ago on a bike trip so this was a delightful time of remembering. Yes – I have the patch on the back of my jacket! On our last trip we went aboard the floating National Historical Landmark, the Charles W Morgan - the last wooden whale ship in the world. Now she is in dry-dock and is being restored even further. They have built a huge staircase up the outside of her black bulking side and have a full canopy above her. Visitors are still allowed to go aboard and climb down into the deep caverns that used to hold the whale blubber and renderings. From the height of her elevated deck, the view of the harbor and the rest of the historical park was like looking down on a scale model scene. We strolled down Main Street and stepped in and out of all the educational seaport shops and restored homes. After H’s afternoon nap, we took a ride to make sure we could find the ferry dock in New London and trusted Lola (the GPS) to find a restaurant for us. She found it but it was closed so we stopped at a little neighborhood bar/grill 3 doors down and can now say that we’ve eaten Dominican Republic food! “Chimi” means sandwich and ours were pork and came with fried plantains! Bananas but different!
You know - when you are in a strange place with an important reason to set the alarm clock to wake up early, you ALWAYS wake up hours before the alarm time! Our reservation for the Cross Sound Ferry, which was to take us from New Holland Connecticut to Orient Point on Long Island, was for 7 am!!!! We both tossed and turned from 3am till the actual alarm time! It was a cool and windy crossing and the boat was chased by thick black threatening clouds but soon the sun came out and shone brightly for the rest of the day. From there we found we needed to take the van on 2 more expensive ferryboat rides before ending up in “the Hamptons”! Narrow, winding, scenic roads, lined with 10ft tall immaculately trimmed hedges, fancy gates protecting the mansions and castles behind them, complete with long disappearing driveways. H thinks that we had the only American made minivan out of all the fancy little shiny foreign cars with funny little designs on the front.
Dinner this evening was Greek - Gyros! Delicious!
