Wednesday, June 3rd

Leaving the Orange

The curtain revealed good news this morning: the sun was back. With it the temperature had risen to an agreeable sixty-five. No hurry, then, while packing the bags and arranging the car for the day. Thanks to yesterday’s midday refueling, I didn’t need petrol either and, one easily corrected wrong turn later, I was back on the motorway. The motivation behind this rather unusual move was to get out of the densely populated region as quickly as possible by racing thirty miles east.

What appeared to be a police cruiser on the middle lane stopped the racing for a bit until it turned out to be a taxi cab. A sign suggested to exit for—Aha!—Yale University at New Haven. The motorway crossed over the mound of Quinnipiac River at the northern end of New Haven’s busy harbour. There was no time for sights watching, though, as the bridge was under construction and the lanes were narrow and erratic.

Soon I reached exit 63 which I had chosen because it seemed to provide best access to area not mapped in orange. Indeed I entered into lush parkland immediately. Hills and trees and pedantic lawns. There were ponds so full of plants I almost mistook them for swamps. A horse rider warning sign completed the picture. This was how Connecticut was supposed to be.

The road kept climbing. It turned and twisted. Some arbitrary stretch, surely there wasn’t more houses, was marked as the village of Killingworth. Higganum, onwards, had a centre, even if it was outright tiny. I backtracked along the eponymous Connecticut River, surprisingly wide and agreeably lazy, to find a crossing. Haddam didn’t have it but East Haddam had.

I crossed the river on, very unusually, a swing bridge. After the bridge was a grand white building overlooking the river. Signs had pointed towards it: Goodspeed Opera House, apparently rather important to the world of musical. It was important—and remote—enough to warrant the Goodspeed Airport just around the corner.

‘Scenic Road, 2.3 miles’ warned a sign and it was right. Magnificent old mansions lined the street out of East Haddam, interrupted by a cemetery of weathered old head stones. Beyond cemetery and mansions loomed the river. The road intended to follow it, rolling along a little up on the shores through a forest, branches overhanging the asphalt. A boat launch provided a place for a stop to snoop around a little and then plot a course onwards.

They surely seemed to like the name Haddam around here. There had been Haddam and East Haddam already. Up the road were Little Haddam, Haddam Neck and Middle Haddam.

I continued to neither of them but instead soon arrived in Moodus. The village was big enough to have its very own, albeit rather small strip mall. By now, the road had left the river shore and travelled further inland. It crossed a lake straight through the middle—highway engineers seemed to love this trick. Houses slowly became fewer and further between. This really was rather quiet. With the sun out, I didn’t even mind the ridiculously low speed limits.

Crossing other, more important roads, sometimes by stop sign, sometimes by traffic light, the landscape slowly became less hilly and more flat. There were more fields now, too, though forests still dominated.

Baltic started with St. Mary’s Church, St. Mary’s Refectory and, sounding rather like a threat, St. Mary’s Educational Centre. All three had a large red brick building of their own. The town itself was sleeping in the midday sun. I crossed over a river and onto an even smaller road, bypassing bold-printed Norwich to the south. Two smoke stacks rose out of the overgrown remains of an old factory by the river.

Following the river for a short while, the road climbed out of the valley once it had crossed the railway. It ventured into hills and dense forests and came to another town, Jewett City, were it crossed not one but two rivers in quick succession. Here, too, was an abandoned factory, before it was swallowed by trees again.

Out of the trees onto a plateau of sorts for Voluntown. It turned out to be the first town in Connecticut that looked somewhat dodgy, the houses in need of repair, even the church could have done with a new coat of paint. The school house was rather desolate, too, but that was entirely normal as schools the world over seemed to be unloved concrete or brick boxes.

This shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise though. For some reason, the area closest to the state line often seemed poorer, perhaps forgotten. Indeed, a little later the road crossed midway through another lake and: ‘Welcome to Rhode Island.’

It climbed up, away from the lake and into forests again. That forest was only briefly interrupted for a village or rather an endless, active school zone alongside the road, featuring three schools and a large sports field. Then back into undisturbed forest until a motorway junction where I had booked a hotel.

It was only around two, but I decided to enjoy a free afternoon for once. I felt a little guilty, but then this was my party and I sure as hell napped if I wanted to.