Today was all about getting out into the New England countryside, so after a brief spell on the interstate we started driving round the small Connecticut villages. Our first stop was Litchfield which is exactly as I imagined towns in this area to be, a collection of wooden boarded houses along one or two roads, in this case it was actually two divided into four so we had the imaginatively named, North Street, South Street, West Street and East Street. We parked the car and started walking round, ending up in the library who provided a Historic Litchfield walking tour leaflet which we followed. This took us round the houses and offices, most of which were built around the late 1780’s when the town was founded, rather strangely they put the First National Bank next to the County Jail which was either a stunning bit of planning so they didn’t have far to take anyone that tried to rob the bank, or incredibly stupid as any criminal in Jail could watch the comings and goings of the bank and work out how to rob it. They are currently doing up the Jail and looking in through the door you could see that they still actually had the jail cells with the jail doors with bar’s on, I hope they keep these when they finish doing up the building. As we were driving around you could see that some of the trees are starting to change colour although this is very early, interestingly each tree actually changes in parts so it is almost the case that a whole branch goes followed by another one until the whole tree has changed. Next we drove towards Cornwall and over the first of our covered bridges at West Cornwall, this is a really small town but did have a railway line and quite a nice railway station although it is now a shop so I am not sure if trains don’t stop there anymore or if you just have to jump down from the train if you want to get off! Anyway we walked down to the bridge which wasn’t as pretty as I expected but was really nice, then we set off to Kent Falls which is in the State Park. We expected to have to pay to go in but as it turned out either we were too late for summer or too early for fall as it wasn’t manned so we parked up and walked as far as we could up the falls. They are running quite fast and you can walk quite close to them, the whole area is surrounded by trees which I think would be very spectacular once the fall is in full bloom but only a few trees have changed. There were a lot of signs about only being able to fish but to only take two fish home despite this we didn’t see any fish which we think were trout as one of the signs did mention them. We then continued the drive towards Yale, first stop was Bulls bridge which was our second covered bridge of the day, this one was probably more impressive as it is by a hydroelectric dam and therefore the water was running very fast, this bridge is where Washington fell in the water which is why it was built, we walked down to the waters edge and had a great view of both the water and the bridge. Our next stop was the town of Kent which was founded in 1735 for the iron mining, it also has a really nice railway station which again has been turned into a shop. We decided we would stop for lunch despite the fact that there only seemed to be about five businesses in the whole town but we did find a grill bar that was open and serving food so, as the only customers we were fitted in and had lunch which was actually really good, I am not sure how they manage to stay in business as at one point Chris and I were the only customers and there were two waitresses and two people working in the kitchen, they did have a bit of a rush on as we were finishing our meal as a couple of people came in for a take away pizza and a local came in for a drink. After this we set off again for New Haven and a drive past of Yale, it is called a red brick university for a reason and that is that is that the brick is very red, unfortunately we got to New Haven at knocking off time so it was actually quite busy so we didn’t manage to stop and take any photos but we have seen the University, it was then time to head back to the hotel and the complimentary drinks until 7pm so we got back about 5.30, sorted out some laundry then went down to the bar for a couple of drinks. I really enjoyed our first drive into the New England forests and hope that the trees start to change soon so we can see some of the spectacular colours we have seen on the postcards.
