Not quite Christmas in Connecticut*! We sweltered in the heat and humidity. I say “sort of” a weekend because it was really Thursday evening and all of Friday and Saturday. We could have stayed Saturday night but we really wanted to pick the dogs up on Sunday and the only way we could pick them up at the Sunday pick-up time of 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. was to come home after Rick’s driving class wrapped up. It saved us another meal out and the cost of our fairly expensive hotel room for another night. So, it worked out fine.

Like I said in my previous post, the state lines are drawn pretty finely between New York and Connecticut. The architecture changed immediately and weathervanes started to appear on houses. Sprawling estates and big private schools which I am assuming were some kind of prep schools were nearly everywhere we looked. You could almost hear the money rubbing together. But more about that in another post.

We stayed at the Interlaken Inn which was close to Lime Rock Park. It was pretty nice. Although not right on the lake, all you had to do was walk across the road and down to the lake. I walked down there by myself the first day early in the morning before all the little kids arrived to splash around. It was very peaceful. The lawn chairs were all lined up and waiting.

The canoes that were provided by the hotel free of charge still rested peacefully at the dock.

After our dinner on Friday night Rick and I walked down to the lake and sat there watching the sun set and listening to the cicadas. The hotel was setting up a ring of chairs around a bonfire for a family reunion. It had a kind of throw-back feel to it, like something from the era of the 50’s and early 60’s when families flocked to just these kind of resorts in the summer. Like in the movie Dirty Dancing, you know?

To amuse myself while Rick was in class I drove in to Millerton, New York which was just a few miles from our hotel and over the border. Millerton has a special appeal to me since my father used to drive up to Millerton when he owned the town newspaper to get it printed. At least that’s what I think he was doing, or maybe it was special off-set press work that this man did for him.

We used to go on a road that my sister and I called the “roller coaster” road because it had so many hills and turns. I remember holding on to the back of the front seats and squealing for joy, pretending I was on a ride. I was on a mission to find that road.

I asked the man in the local book store and we got out a map and talked about the choices. He didn’t really know which road I was talking about, but he pointed out a couple that he thought might be it.

Millerton has changed a lot since those days. It’s still an old-homey kind of town though. The stores all have what look like the original wood floors. The kind that creak and groan when you walk on them.

We saw quite a few defunct old railroad station buildings, both in New York and Connecticut. They preserved them which was nice. This is a peek at Millerton’s. It looked like it was now a real estate office.

You could see where the railroad used to be, and across the street they have made the old railroad bed into a hike and bike trail which I thought was pure genius.

I also drove to this covered bridge in West Cornwall, CT. As you can see it is still a working bridge with one-way traffic. (For more info on the bridge follow the link!)

If you look closely in this photo you can see the fisherman standing in the river.

And that, my friends, concludes Part 1 of our Weekend in Connecticut.

*One of my favorite Christmas movies: the old 1945 version with Barbara Stanwyck. Classic!