Farmington River

Saturday #3

This one includes maybe Connecticut's best series of waterfalls, a mellow bike path along the Farmington River, a great ice cream shop, a castle, a kayak launch and a couple of great bridges. 

I think a really fun way to do this would be if you had a couple of people that wanted to bike an easy, paved 20 miles -- all on a bike path, with lunch in the middle and ice cream at the end -- and another couple of people that wanted to explore the shops in a quaint Connecticut town (and meet for lunch and then ice cream). 

I did the map in the link as a bike route to show where the bike trail -- from the parking area for the Farmington River Trail at 350 Collinsville Road to the ice cream shop -- goes; driving would be a little different but following a similar route would be great.

Countryside Park in Avon features a couple of ponds and a covered bridge. Nice spot. 

The next stop is a parking area for the Farmington River Trail, a 16-mile alternate path of the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail that (mostly) connects Southington, CT, to the Massachusetts border north of Suffield with paved, bike-only trails. There are a couple of short crushed-stone sections and a few spots where the trail follows small, lightly-trafficked roads, and at least one section that is still in the planning stage. The parking area is at the 3.5-mile mark of this map. The trail from here winds along a beautiful section of the Farmington River. It's wide, rocky, meandering and a slight uphill grade as the current lazes toward you. 

I loved the very long railroad bridge and the mill ruins in Collinsville. If you don't have a canoe or kayak but still want to paddle at Lake McDonough (toward the end of this trip), then you can rent a kayak or canoe for $25-$35 a day here at Collinsville Canoe and Kayak. 

It's about a 13-mile ride from that parking area to Benny's of Simsbury, a popular, tasty breakfast place in a bustling Connecticut town. 

Eight miles further along, now along the Farmington Canal Trail proper, is Grassroots Ice Cream. There were three of us and we got Goat Cheese and Blackberry, Rose Chocolate, Blood Orange Chocolate, Honey Lavender, Coconut, Cinnamon. They were all amazing. We also sampled (and loved) Raspberry Cheesecake Brownie, Birch Beer, Black Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup and Lemon Bar. Definitely the most unique flavors I've seen around here. 

A few miles west is my favorite set of Connecticut waterfalls, Kent Falls. We went during a rainstorm, which was great because we had it mostly to ourselves and because the falls were really gushing.

A few miles on is Saville Dam, with its gatehouse turret in Barkhamstead Reservoir upstream and the wakeless Lake McDonough just downstream, there is some great sightseeing and some of the most beautiful flatwater paddling around.

This reservoir is on a Farmington River tributary, so to give this post a little more symmetry, let's continue a few miles to where we started -- at a bridge on the Farmington River. This one is called Church Pool Bridge aka Pleasant Valley Bridge.