52 Saturdays in Connecticut

Bettie and I moved to Connecticut at the end of August 2022. We will be here for a year or two for her post-doctorate job in ASL linguistics at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. I've never been to New England, not once in my 47 years, and so I'm trying to see some of it while I'm here. As always, I'm looking for the things I love -- waterfalls, viewpoints, ice cream, skiing, old cemeteries, solitude. I bought a gravel bike a couple years ago, so I'm looking for places to ride that. I bought a birdfeeder and some binoculars a year ago,  so I'm seeking birding opportunities too. And we just purchased our first kayaks (they're in the mail), so we're going to try that out as well. 

It's different here. 

The highly recommended view from the Fifty-Foot Cliff has 70-foot trees in front of it. 

There are a bunch of places to go "hiking" -- and they're all beautiful -- but if you see that an area has "16 miles of trails," it's still just a 3-mile diameter patch of woods with less than 500 feet of elevation difference from the lowest point to the highest, it just has a lot of trails spiderwebbing through the tract. 

About half the ice cream shops close for the season after Labor Day and half of the rest close after New Year's Day. 

A "long, pitted dirt road to the parking area" that makes a waterfall hike a "hidden gem" may end up being 0.8 miles long and no problem in a CRV. 

So far, it has basically snowed as much as downtown Santa Fe or Spanish Fork, but if you want to gain 3,000 feet of elevation (the equivalent of driving the 30 minutes to Ski Santa Fe) to find some deeper snow, you have to drive two states away to Vermont. 

But there are plenty of birds, there is way more water, and the old cemeteries are the best I've seen this side of Ireland. 

So I'm attempting to resurrect the blog as a journal of sorts and also maybe as a head start for the next naive Western outdoorsy type that moves to or visits the Northeast.