Episode 54 | Niantic, Connecticut
Season 5. New England. Connecticut first.
I landed at Westchester and drove north through a string of small towns that looked like someone had commissioned them specifically to represent the concept of New England. Quiet main streets, white church steeples, harbor views appearing around corners without warning. The kind of scenery that makes you slow down not because you planned to, but because something out the window told you to.
I ended up in Niantic, a small coastal town near Mystic, checked into a little inn overlooking the harbor, and immediately went outside to scout the morning. Old habit. You arrive somewhere new and the first thing you do is figure out where the light is going to be.
The answer, in Niantic, was obvious. The sun sets behind the inn, which means it rises over the water. Boats in the marina, a cloudy sky doing something interesting, and a clear shot at a decent sunrise if I set the alarm. I made a note. I went back inside.
It was a quiet travel day, which is sometimes exactly what you need between one chapter and the next. Montana and Idaho are still processing somewhere in the back of my head. New England is a completely different register — older, denser, the history visible in the architecture rather than the landscape. The Rocky Mountain West is all scale and sky. New England is texture and detail and things that have been in the same place for three hundred years and don’t particularly care what you think about that.
Niantic, for its part, is known for a few things. It’s a favorite for beachgoers, it sits right next to Mystic, and it has what I’m told is the only book barn in the country that spans multiple buildings. I didn’t get there on this pass. That’s the kind of place you need an afternoon for, and the afternoon was already gone.
Tomorrow is Mystic Seaport, which is one of the country’s premier maritime museums and also, if the 1988 film Mystic Pizza is to be believed, the place where Julia Roberts launched her career. You can still get a slice, apparently. I intend to verify this personally.
Good night, Connecticut.
