Making our way through New England

Again, I'm behind. We were in Boston last night and we didn't have wireless in our room, only in the lobby, so I wasn't able to post. Anyway, this is from two days ago now.

This morning we woke up in Connecticut. We’re staying with family friends of Jim’s for a few days while we trompse around New England. We were planning to go to New York tomorrow but it’s supposed be raining, so we’re working on a Plan B.


Yesterday we went to the County Pancake House in Ridgewood, NJ. It was featured on a couple of shows on the Travel Channel. I think Adam went there on Man vs. Food. The pancakes there are HUMONGOUS! We ordered the “4 Medium” option and they were as big as out plates! The other option (although not available on the varieties that we ordered) was the “2 large.” The girl at the table next to us ordered them and they sagged over the sides of her plate by about two inches on either side. They were insane!

The dinosaur tracks

Today we went to Dinosaur State Park and Gillette Castle, both in CT. Dinosaur Park was pretty interesting because this guy was excavating a site where a state building was going to be built and he happened to come across some fossilized dinosaur footprints. I guess there are close to 2,000 of them and the state built a museum over the site to display them for the public. Only like 500 of them are on display, the others are preserved elsewise in different parts of the building, I guess. But it was interesting to see evidence that such completely different creatures walked in the same spot so many millions of years ago.
Gillette Castle was built by William Gillette in 1919 as a retirement house. Evidently he played Sherlock Holmes (Mike said someone else played Sherlock Holmes, so I don’t know…). The whole castle is made of stone…or at least surrounded with stone. It’s really an amazing sight. I guess they run tours through it, but it was “closed for the season,” like so many other things we’ve wanted to see.

The view from the castle was amazing. I wouldn't mind retiring there!

We went back to the house and rested for a while. We’ve both been really tired lately for some reason. We’ve been sleeping ok, so I’m not sure what the deal is. We sat down before Mike and Linda got home from work and watched a show called “Deep Sea Salvagers” on Discovery Channel or something. It was about this team of guys who are hired to fix things like busted oil barges in the Mississippi River and beached tug boats and stuff like that. It was kind of intense! In the one episode the guys dove into the Mississippi to check out the status of the oil barge and each time they dove down (80 feet to where the problem was), there was a chance they could die and all sorts of stuff went wrong and…it certainly kept our attention. Anyway, we watched that…there were several episodes on…until they got home and then Mike made “Grandma’s Mac and Cheese” for dinner. It was delicious! It was like regular mac and cheese except he put mozzarella cheese and tomatoes in it. Mike can cook almost as good as Donnie! (ALMOST, Donnie. ALMOST)
We had to do laundry again and for some stupid reason we didn’t start it until after 9:00, so we were up until almost midnight and we still had to put the last load in the dryer in the morning. I was exhausted by the time I hit the air mattress and I was asleep almost instantly, despite Jim’s snoring next to me.