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Things in Connecticut
May. 20th, 2023 05:04 pmWe arrived in Connecticut yesterday morning and helped Mason with his last minute packing stuff. Our car is now loaded down with the books he's bringing home for the summer. The rest is stored in a nearby storage united rented by him and his friends.
Today, despite the rain, we went off for a little sight seeing.
When Mason's friend Dalton and his mom visited Connecticut a couple of months ago, they went to Dinosaur State Park. Mason remembered the place fondly enough to want to show it to us. The main attraction is a huge slab of rock with fossilized dinosaur tracks, left by ornithopods. A cool thing to see, but difficult to express in photographs. I tried anyway:
Image: ancient footprints! Oooo! Ahhh! Yeah, okay, it doesn't look like much.
They tried to help you visualized how cool this really was with a lot of dioramas and statues of life-sized dinosaurs.
Image: Look, this is who might have made these tracks! Are you impressed yet??
I fail dinosaur because I don't immediately recognize the one pictured above. Please drop me a comment if you do. But, I know for sure that it's an ornithopod, because I failed a quiz to guess what type of tracks these were. My guess had been theropod, like T-Rex or velociraptors, because I had assumed they were the only three-toed dinosaurs. Shows you what I know!
At any rate, the whole place was quite fun. If you are a dinosaur fan, I would say it's worth the detour. Because it's part of the State Park system, there are several walking trails. We didn't wander too far in the rain, but we did do a tiny bit of the bog walk. We wandered out as far as a little observation platform and looked out at the bog and watched the rain on the water.
Then we headed down to the coast to Niantic. We've been to Niantic before and so we didn't do much meandering. Instead, we drove straight to Skipper's to have our now traditional lobster roll. In Connecticut, lobster rolls are served hot with melted butter. Wikipedia informs me that legend has it that the lobster roll was invented in Milford, Connecticut, so probably to get it "done right" we should have tracked down Perry's. But, we go to Niantic because Niantic is also home to the Book Barn. There are several Book Barns in town, in fact. We really love the one in downtown on Main Street, because that's where they house the science fiction. Since the rain was coming down quite hard at this point, book browsing was perfect, indoors. We did briefly stop by the big barn complex/campus, but a lot of it was closed up to protect the books. It was actually pleasant that way? Not too many people were there. The cat who greeted us was very determinedly looking her "her person." According to the staff, she has a favorite whom she even goes home with on occasion because he lives nearby. He had had to run back home for his cell, so she was stomping around, glancing at peopled, quickly deciding we were not HIM, and moving on. It was really adorable.
When I was at the Main Street annex, I picked up a couple of Star Trek books for light reading. They had two written by Diane Duane: Spock's World and The Wounded Sky.
On the way out of town we stopped at another State Park, Rocky Neck State Park. The thing I most wanted to see there were the salt marshes. We drove past those and saw a lot of egrets and Canada geese, but there wasn't clear directions about where to park to walk around those, so we checked out the beach, despite the rain. Again, thanks to the drizzle, we were alone.
After all that, we were all pooped out. We came back to our AirBnB (which is quite lovely) and CRASHED.
The best part of the morning was probably seeing the year old African spurred tortoise, who was getting to have a clover snack, at the Dinosaur State Park.
Image: tortoise eating clover. Head is blurry because he was eating in a frenzy! Very cute.
Today, despite the rain, we went off for a little sight seeing.
When Mason's friend Dalton and his mom visited Connecticut a couple of months ago, they went to Dinosaur State Park. Mason remembered the place fondly enough to want to show it to us. The main attraction is a huge slab of rock with fossilized dinosaur tracks, left by ornithopods. A cool thing to see, but difficult to express in photographs. I tried anyway:
Image: ancient footprints! Oooo! Ahhh! Yeah, okay, it doesn't look like much.
They tried to help you visualized how cool this really was with a lot of dioramas and statues of life-sized dinosaurs.
Image: Look, this is who might have made these tracks! Are you impressed yet??
I fail dinosaur because I don't immediately recognize the one pictured above. Please drop me a comment if you do. But, I know for sure that it's an ornithopod, because I failed a quiz to guess what type of tracks these were. My guess had been theropod, like T-Rex or velociraptors, because I had assumed they were the only three-toed dinosaurs. Shows you what I know!
At any rate, the whole place was quite fun. If you are a dinosaur fan, I would say it's worth the detour. Because it's part of the State Park system, there are several walking trails. We didn't wander too far in the rain, but we did do a tiny bit of the bog walk. We wandered out as far as a little observation platform and looked out at the bog and watched the rain on the water.
Then we headed down to the coast to Niantic. We've been to Niantic before and so we didn't do much meandering. Instead, we drove straight to Skipper's to have our now traditional lobster roll. In Connecticut, lobster rolls are served hot with melted butter. Wikipedia informs me that legend has it that the lobster roll was invented in Milford, Connecticut, so probably to get it "done right" we should have tracked down Perry's. But, we go to Niantic because Niantic is also home to the Book Barn. There are several Book Barns in town, in fact. We really love the one in downtown on Main Street, because that's where they house the science fiction. Since the rain was coming down quite hard at this point, book browsing was perfect, indoors. We did briefly stop by the big barn complex/campus, but a lot of it was closed up to protect the books. It was actually pleasant that way? Not too many people were there. The cat who greeted us was very determinedly looking her "her person." According to the staff, she has a favorite whom she even goes home with on occasion because he lives nearby. He had had to run back home for his cell, so she was stomping around, glancing at peopled, quickly deciding we were not HIM, and moving on. It was really adorable.
When I was at the Main Street annex, I picked up a couple of Star Trek books for light reading. They had two written by Diane Duane: Spock's World and The Wounded Sky.
On the way out of town we stopped at another State Park, Rocky Neck State Park. The thing I most wanted to see there were the salt marshes. We drove past those and saw a lot of egrets and Canada geese, but there wasn't clear directions about where to park to walk around those, so we checked out the beach, despite the rain. Again, thanks to the drizzle, we were alone.
After all that, we were all pooped out. We came back to our AirBnB (which is quite lovely) and CRASHED.
The best part of the morning was probably seeing the year old African spurred tortoise, who was getting to have a clover snack, at the Dinosaur State Park.
Image: tortoise eating clover. Head is blurry because he was eating in a frenzy! Very cute.
