Wethersfield, Hartford, Groton & Mystic

The hotel where we spent Wednesday night, right off the freeway, was sort of depressed. The room was nice enough, but the area felt a little sketchy. Both of us were relieved when our car was still there in the morning. We did have a nice serve-yourself breakfast before we left though.

On our way out of town we detoured through Historic Weathersfield and gawked at the many houses dating from the early 1700s. Kathy was really impressed by this more recent house, featured in the Hallmark movie, Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane.

It was only a half-hour to Hartford, but it was harrowing. It's one thing to drive in LA-like traffic when you're familiar with the freeways, but quite another when you're new in town. Avoiding mayhem, we arrived a little after 10am at the Mark Twain House and Museum. Once there, parking was free and easy.

Visits to Twain's house are by guided tour only. We already had a 12-noon tour scheduled next door at the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, so we got tickets for the 1:30 tour immediately following. Since we had an hour before the first tour, we watched a short Ken Burns biography of Twain's life. Then, Kathy  took some time to straighten Mr. Clemens out on several points of theology.

I got my portrait taken with a Lego version of Twain, and admired a huge glazed figure of the Calaveras County jumping frog.

There were six people on our tour of Harriet Beecher Stowe's house right next door. She retired to Hartford's Nook Farm artists colony after the Civil War, when she was already famous. 

Unlike the Twain house, we were permitted to take pictures inside. The entryway featured quotes from famous people through history about the importance (or unimportance) of her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. My favorite was the quote from Lincoln: "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." (Stowe was under five feet tall.)

Stowe wrote her books wherever she happened to be in the house. Uncle Tom's Cabin was originally serialized in an Abolitionist newspaper, so she was always under a deadline (which is what the museum's curators were trying to indicate with the papers strewn on the floor).

In addition to her bedroom, much of Uncle Tom's Cabin was written from her dining room table, from where she tried to write and keep an eye on her children at the same time.

Stowe's house is fairly modest. Her next door neighbor, Mark Twain's house, was much more elaborate. Lots of dark wood, statuary, and art objects, with an interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Twain wrote his most famous books from here, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Photography isn't permitted inside the building, but Kathy forgot and I thought it would be a shame to let this photo of their conservatory go to waste. 

The outside of the building has been beautifully restored. Those of you who know Mark Twain's story know that he eventually went bankrupt and was forced to sell the house. It eventually became a boy's boarding school before being turned into a museum and restored starting in the 1950s.

Our stop for the night was Mystic, Connecticut. My original plan was to visit the Seaport Museum. Leaving Hartford, though, we had one stop to make on the way, in Groton, next to New London. This is the house where Kathy lived for the first year of her life. Ed was in the Navy, and he, Eileen, and new baby Kathleen called this attic apartment across the street from the Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park, home.

We finally made to to Mystic after 6pm. We were starved so we checked into our room at the Taber Inn and went looking for dinner. I was too hungry to take pictures. After dinner, we went by the Mystic Seaport Museum (long past closed) and got a picture of one of the boats being restored. After that, to bed. Tomorrow we'll see how the really rich lived in Newport, Rhode Island during the Gilded Age.