[Confession – I didn’t realize I couldn’t correctly spell Connecticut until I started writing about it here- yikes!!! How did I get to my age this way?!]

We did eventually end up in Connecticut, using our vintage 1973 Connecticut state map, with advertisements along the edge for businesses that had closed decades ago. We stayed with friends that my parents had met when my dad was still working on his PhD at University of Florida and we lived in married student housing apartments, fellow students with a family who have kept in touch over the long decades that have passed since those days.

None of us have ever been to Connecticut before, and we found it to be a very picturesque place – cute saltbox houses and pretty landscapes. There is a lot of money in Connecticut, and everything was very neat and pretty and maintained.

Our friends live in the most beautiful house on top of a hill, and everything is gorgeous and perfect and artistically decorated, so we felt kind of bad unloading our grungy travel stuff, with the “bed of nails” camping mattresses unfolding themselves like ugly caterpillars and rolling around on the driveway in the process. The house also had a great little workout room, and Rose worked herself into a jelly every evening and ended up very tired and grouchy at the end of the visit, but hopefully more fit.

They made us feel very welcome, and took us around touring. The first day we went to see the Mark Twain House and the Harriet Beecher Stowe house, which are right next to each other.

The Mark Twain house was fascinating. His wife had money, and they had artsy friends do the decorating and designing. There are very beautiful stencil paintings on the wall that resemble the patterns on Indian saris and ivory inlay (no photos, sorry! I was still finding the charging cord to the phone at this point in the trip). If someone suggested doing stencil paintings on walls I immediately imagine something really tacky, but this was incredible.

We enjoyed the stories about the family – they sounded like kindred spirits – homeschooling, big library, putting on family theater plays, lots of cats underfoot. You could certainly feel a presence on the second floor where their oldest daughter died tragically at age 24.

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house ran tours slightly differently. They like to have a dialogue with the tour and educate them about slavery.

I was just going to admire the pottery and décor, I really was, and it was only after the tour guide, who said he was an English major, really started prodding for a discussion that I opened my mouth. The tour was just us and one extremely introverted older man with a fancy camera, so we were kind of on the spot.

The tour guide started to have serious misgivings about his job once I started on the subject of rare earth mineral mining, which, by the way, is a modern slave industry that supports all our cell phones, computers, cars and other electronic devices, and is run by literal African child slaves who are worked to death in unbelievably cruel conditions.

The guide manfully changed the subject after not knowing what to say, and guided us into a different room, and started telling us about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s family – all very intense and brainy Calvinists, and then made the mistake of probing for a dialogue again.

It didn’t quite go as usual, I imagine, and he escorted us upstairs to change the subject again after a practically one-sided discussion of the early days of the Holy Roman Empire, the feudal system, slavery in ancient Rome, Civil-war era slave work camps in the North, emigrant child factory workers, modern globalization’s half century development of more fiscally profitable replacement of slaves by economically unbalancing farmers in undeveloped places to flood work markets with so much cheap labor that people are paid below the cost of living and are treated like disposable humans, and brought the tour to a quick close after I started quoting Etienne de la Boetie from memory. He was certainly glad to see the back of us!

On the way back, we stopped at the Capital building in Hartford, and admired the statues outside – all depicting ancient dignitaries of our early government and stories I was probably supposed to learn in school but have no memory of now.

The next day was even more full – we met our hosts’ friends, who had recently moved here from Ukraine, and we went on a steam-powered train that was over a hundred years old, and beautifully refurbished.

Afterwards, we stopped at a local art gallery and admired a lot of nice pieces, and got ice cream.

On the way home we stopped at a waterfall, and tried to look at two famous lighthouses. This was perhaps the most quintessential Connecticut experience, according to our friends, as the lighthouses were both surrounded by opulent country club with DO NOT ENTER signs, blocking the view. One road was poorly labeled, so we tried it, but were unable to get very close. We stopped a minute on a pull-off to get our bearings, and a security guard hired for the riff-raff zipped over in a golf cart and bounced us out!

After all that, we were really tired and took a day off to rest.

It took a bit of a struggle, but we did manage to pack everything back in the car again after that, and headed up to Maine with our paper maps on hand!