“Revolutionary
Road: The Experience”
9/26/15,
“Coastal Connecticut”
Mystic,
Connecticut
There are
trips that are designed around seeing a specific site (e.g., Burj Khalifa, the
Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Stadium), while other trips are designed around
going somewhere and seeing what there is to see along the way. This trip is the latter. After having such an enjoyable time travelling
to Nearby New Jersey and Exciting Delaware last month, we decided to make this
trip to Coastal Connecticut and Revolutionary Rhode Island. The leaves are changing, and there were
iconic restauarants and famous historic sites to see, along with the
Washington-Rochambeau Revolutionary Route, which we will be driving tomorrow
from Newport to New York.
We all got a
late start this morning, so we didn’t meet at the car rental place until almost
10 AM. After a bit of delay getting
breakfast, it was 10:30 AM before we were on the road. The distance to our hotel was only three
hours, and it was ten hours before dark, so time was hardly a factor. It was just an issue of how we wanted to
spend the balance of those seven (or more, actually, since we merely had to
stop sightseeing at dark, not be at the hotel) hours.
I had come up with a list of National
Historic Landmarks along the way, the coastal route today, the revolutionary
route tomorrow. Most of them were in New
Haven, along with Connecticut’s winner for “most iconic restaurant.” I lit up the Davidoff Escurio and put on
Red. We were soon at the famous,
historic home of Stephen Tyng Mather, the first Director of the National Park
Service. For all the National Parks I
have seen, it was quite impressive to be at his boyhood home. We then headed straight to New Haven.
I coyly told my friends that we were going to
an iconic restaurant, where a famous sandwich was invented. Before long, we parked outside of Louis’s
Lunch. We walked in, and it was cramped
and crowded. My friend was confused, not
seeing a proper menu. I pointed to the
sign that said hamburgers were served with or without cheese, optional toppings
of onions and tomatoes. She said that
she thought I said a famous sandwich was invented there. I offered that a hamburger is a type of
sandwich. It was at that moment that she
realized I had brought her to the place the hamburger was invented.
I got a bag of chips and a diet birch beer to
go with my burger, on which I chose to have only onions. The burger were not particular good, and they
were very small, but that didn’t matter.
What mattered was that this was the original. That, a hundred years ago, someone decided to
put some chopped meat between two slices of toast. Now, you can go to a supermarket and buy
bread specifically designed to hold the chopped meat.
Yale was not too far away, so we left the
car. There were five National Historic
Landmarks within a one-mile walk, so we went to each one in turn, almost a
repeat of our tour of Princeton’s National Historic Landmarks last month. We started with the oldest building on
campus, Connecticut Hall, which took a bit of an effort to find.
I lit up a Churchill, and we were on our way,
cutting across the New Haven Green, another National Historic Landmark, the
main town square. It was then obvious we
were in town and no longer on campus.
The next three sites to see were homes of former Yale notables.
We headed down Trumbull Street, which housed
two of the homes. The first home
belonged to Lafayette Mendel, who discovered Vitamins A and B, nothing to
sneeze at, now a law office. We headed
to the other end of Trumbull Street.
As we walked, we noticed with shock that almost every
building on the street was now type of professional office, mostly law
offices. We got to the home of Russell
Henry Chittenden, who was considered the “Father of American
Biochemistry.” It was a law office. Now it’s abandoned.
I looked up the remaining sites and realized
that another site was nearby, the former home of James Dwight Dana, an eminent
geology professor. There were two sites
left in New Haven, but we needed to get the car. Besides, my cigar was almost done. It was less than a mile back to the car, so
we made our way.
My friends needed
water, and, when they stopped, I saw a cigar lounge, so I stopped there to get
some cigars and a whiskey. They had a
special edition Connecticut cigar, one of my favorite brands. That doesn’t mean the cigar was only sold in
Connecticut. It means that it used
Connecticut tobacco for the wrapper.
Reader, you know me well enough to know that I was incapable of not
buying that. I lit that up, the brand
was My Father, and waited in the lounge for my friends.
We headed back to the car and put the
cemetery in the GPS. Grove Street
Cemetery housed such luminaries as Eli Whitney, Noah Webster, and Roger
Sherman. We got there just as it was
closing and raced to find Roger Sherman’s grave, finding it with some
difficulty.
The last NHL in New Haven
was the Connecticut Agriculture Experiment Station, where Vitamin A was first
created. We got there in due time, but
there was nothing to see, so we just took a few ceremonial pictures. That left the oldest house in Connecticut,
the Henry Whitfield House, as our next destination, but it was about 20 minutes
away, and my cigar would not last that long.
I had misremembered the itinerary I put together and forgotten that the
last NHL of the day was west of Mystic, which meant we had two sites before Mystic,
instead of one. If I had remembered, I
would have lit up a cigar at the first site and been done with it before we got
to Mystic. Instead, I lit up my smallest
cigar, a Jericho Hill, thinking I’d finish it before we got to Mystic. The stone house formerly belonging to
Reverend Whitfield was clearly old. It
looked like it was 350 years old, no doubt.
As we were preparing to leave, all starving at that point, I realized my
mistake.
Worse, the cigar would not last
until the next site, since I had chosen such a small cigar. I got a snack and lit up my second smallest
cigar, a Camacho, as we drove to New London, where Eugene O’Neil’s Summer House
was. It was a nice house, but we were
all starving, the hamburgers having been nowhere near satisfying. Dinner was to be at Mystic Pizza, and we
joked if we’d each eat a whole pie. I
took some ceremonial pictures and got back in the car.
We headed straight to Mystic. Like Louis’s Lunch the quality of the food
was not why we were going. It’s famous
and iconic status was the reason. I love
that movie. We couldn’t not go. I ordered a large house special and a Diet
Coke for myself. My friends got a large
cheese to share.
The pizza was very
disappointing. There are so many places
within a short walk of my apartment in New York that have better pizza. The crust couldn’t even hold all the toppings
of the house special. I was so
disappointed. In the end, I wound up
forgoing the crust and just eating the toppings with a knife and fork. That was really good. I also got a t-shirt, of course. We went back to the car to get supplies and
then headed to the waterfront, where we found a bench and I lit up my Ardor and
proceeded to write this entry, which I will now close so that we can make our
way to Newport. Mystic is such a lovely
town, and I would have been happy spending a whole weekend here, but, alas, we
are only spending two hours here.
Well, I
don’t really have much more to write, but I picked this hotel, instead of
getting a cheaper hotel in Warwick or Jamestown or Bristol, so that I could
write an entry with a Newark dateline, so, by golly, I’m writing something, and
I’m going to keep writing until my Chinese food comes, or until I have a
respectable entry. Oh right, that Chinese
food. It’s here. I need to pause.
Okay, so,
it’s here, so I’ll just quickly wrap up.
As we were sitting at Mystic Pizza, starving, we joked about our
adventures with Chinese food in Dover last time and said that we needed to get
Chinese food. Well, after eating a whole
pizza that seemed less likely. After
stopping at two places for ice cream (for comparison purposes, of course), it
seemed like it was going to happen. The
cookie I ate in the car pretty much cancelled out any possibility of Chinese
food. However, in the end, I ordered it
because I couldn’t not do it.
Okay, so
after we closed, we stopped for ice cream, then went to the spice shop, then
went to another ice cream place, then back to the car. We drove the first half of the drive almost
entirely in silence, me left to my thoughts, my friends to their electronic
devices. The second half was spent
discussing a news item, some police action in Long Island. Before long, we got to the hotel, checked in,
headed to the room, and I ordered my Chinese food. I then proceeded to write this entry, which I
will now close so that I can enjoy my Chinese food.
“Revolutionary
Road: The Experience”
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