Connecticut

New England consists of six states in the northeastern corner of the United States - Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine.  Well, we've reached New England. 

Our campground is in Moodus, Connecticut, and in fact, this region is chock full of picturesque towns, both beside the Connecticut River and along the Atlantic coast.  A few miles away from our RV park is the village of East Haddam, and one night we attended The Will Rogers Follies there at the Goodspeed Opera House, which was built in 1876, went into disrepair, was restored in 1959, and since 1963 has been the site of highly professional musical productions, mostly featuring actors, singers, and dancers from the Broadway stage.

It's an adorable little theater, with a grand stairway entrance.

Will Rogers was a cowboy humorist, partly of Cherokee extraction, who became a star of Broadway, radio, and the movies.  His most famous line was, "I never met a man I didn't like."  The Will Rogers Follies, a story of his life and times, was a hit on Broadway in 1991.  This revival was beautifully done - hard to imagine a better version - with high-quality singing and dancing.  It was a lovely evening.

Also in East Haddam is the Gillette Castle State Park.  William Gillette was a famous stage actor from about 1880 to 1930 whose most significant accomplishment from our point of view is that he established in the mind of America the current image of Sherlock Holmes, with deerstalker cap and curved pipe.

In 1914 he began construction of a grand home in East Haddam.  Naturally, I'm interested in any obsessive who designs and builds his own castle.  We weren't impressed by the exterior of the structure ...

.. but the interior was quite lovely, with some fascinating woodworking details.

One day we drove to Mystic, Connecticut, an attractive town on the coast.  After a nice lunch overlooking the sea, we toured the Mystic Seaport Museum, an extensive recreation of a whalers' village.  We went aboard the Charles W. Morgan, built in 1841, the only surviving whalers' ship of that era, and got an impression of what life was like onboard.

Just down the road from our campground is the schoolhouse in which Nathan Hale, a hero of the Revolutionary War, taught, after attending Yale at age 14.  Nathan Hale was convicted of espionage by the British and executed at age 18, and he's best remembered for his last words: "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country."  Two nice ladies filled us in on his history.

Today we visited another couple of cute little towns in the area - Old Saybrook and Essex - and had lunch at the restaurant in the Griswold Inn in Essex, a beautiful old hotel Nancy and my mother and I had stayed in on a previous trip many years ago.  The restaurant is an incredible room, maybe my favorite interior ever, with wonderful framed drawings and paintings of sailing ships covering all the walls.

I'm a big fan of the area.  It's full of important historical details.  The villages and houses and meandering roads are absolutely charming, and I really liked the people we talked with, in spite of the old cliches about the standoffish New England personality.  We haven't found the perfect town here that checks off all our preferred characteristics, but we'll keep looking.