Today was our first “tourism” day with the caravan; this will be the test.  We have about 30 of these days; if you know me, I’m not a big fan of tourist things.  But I will endure and hold off judgement until we are complete.  Today, we head to Mystic Seaport…

 

I mentioned how we convoyed into Ashaway with 4 Airstreams.  Tourism days on the caravan means a convoy of pick-up trucks and Suburbans… We do carpool, but even with 4 people per vehicle this still means 12 vehicles heading down the road together…

We hitched a ride with a neighbor, since we still had 8 cases of water and 3 cases of wine taking up all of our back seat area. (We need to drink this wine before we enter Canada…).

The visitor’s center is quite impressive – resembling an ocean wave, an homage to the seafaring nature of the Atlantic coast of New England…

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Mystic Seaport is a delightful area of recreations of 17th and 18th century industry and craftsmanship.

There was a whaling ship, and we could tour the various decks seeing the caption’s quarters, the “tween decks”, where the crew lived, and the cargo level where the whale blubber was rendered into oil… There was a crew on-board who demonstrated raising and lowering the sails.

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There was a building housing an exhibit of “Cat Boats”, small, simple boats used for various utilitarian purposes as well as for recreation and racing…

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Back in 2004 we visited Plymouth, MA; we saw “the rock” and we saw “Mayflower II”. Today, “Mayflower II” is in Mystic, undergoing a full restoration in preparation of the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing in 1620.  We could not see much of it, but here it is:

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This lighthouse, in Mystic Seaport, is a reproduction of the light on Nantucket. It is claimed to be the shortest lighthouse in the USA, but, who knows?  I think tour guides just make things up. We saw lights in Newport and Plymouth and Provincetown that seem to be just as short…

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After our time in Mystic it was time for lunch.  No, not Mystic Pizza… (I had been there in 2008…). We went to Noank, CT, to Costello’s Crab Shank. We were originally scheduled to have lunch at Abbot’s Lobster in the Rough, but four busloads of tourists had descended on the place, so we opted to go to Costello’s.  They are owned by the same people and our wait-staff were from Abbott’s.  The feature here was, of course, lobster.  We started with a nice clam soup (not chowder…) and a huge bowl of Steamers and Mussels.  The then lobsters – two 1-1/4 lb. lobsters…

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We returned to the Villa, in the rain…  Tomorrow we head towards Newport… An enjoyable time was had by all…