27.5 mi / 10.3 mph / 1150 ft. climbing
Home: Burlingame State Park

The weather pattern remains stuck in place, so we have our third day of good northeast winds and our third day of clouds, but, our first morning drizzle. At first it was light enough that it wasn’t even making noise on the tent and didn’t really make anything wet. Still, we moved everything under a pavilion in the campground and cooked breakfast there. At least the winds helped the tent dry out before I packed it away. The campground oddly didn’t have any dishwashing station, and the open green-lawn sites didn’t really lend themselves dumping rinse-water on the ground. That’s not a problem for the 99% of people in their RVs, but it made things annoying for us. On the other hand, a lot of campgrounds like this don’t even accept non-RVs (for this exact reason!), so we’re glad this place allows tents (and even has dedicated “tent sites”), it’s just funny that they then didn’t really think through how to accommodate them.

This was Day 2 of our “Mystic Pizza” tour, with the main target being Stonington, another small historic peninsular village, some five miles east of Mystic. The road was a bit busier than yesterday’s, making it hard to look at all the beautiful properties we were riding past, but we still did our best!

We rode nearly every street in Stonington, a village even more historically-charming than Noank. And, being out on a peninsula, it’s a place we never would have explored if not for the attraction of the “Mystic Pizza” locations. So thanks Rett (and her mom!) for giving me the “excuse” to see and feel this place.

The highlight was the building that was used as the set for the Mystic Pizza restaurant in the movie. Again, Mystic Pizza is a real restaurant that existed before the movie, that inspired the movie, and still exists today, but it’s not what you see in the movie. That was built here in Stonington instead, and while it’s no longer a pizza restaurant (and never actually was), it’s instantly recognizable from the movie.

We thought we were done with that area and were heading back north to see if we could stumble across a cute restaurant for lunch. But then I reminded Rett that when we had headed down to look at the backside of the Mystic Pizza building, we had been steps away from the Breakwater Restaurant, which she had marked on her map as the place that Charlie took Daisy on their first date. She very much liked the idea of being Daisy (Julia Roberts) and having a rich guy (me) take her on a date there, so, after I quickly checked online that the prices weren’t completely insane (unlike Charlie, I’m not rich because of my parents’ money, I’m rich because I avoid getting low value for my own money!), we turned around for our date.

There was a slightly-wind-sheltered outdoor seating area that I was leaning towards, but Rett made a request for inside. The hostess seated us at a table for two, apologizing for the limited options since they had reservations that they had to move inside due to the cool and windy weather. Our waiter, JT (who again, wasn’t even born when Mystic Pizza was released, though he had seen it once a long time ago), wasn’t sure if anything from the movie was even filmed here; he’d heard both yes and no from other people. So Rett brought up the movie on her phone. It took us a few minutes, and the windows are different, and of course the paint, oh, but there’s that little 3-inch bump-out in the corner next to the exact same doorway, so yes, this is 100% the place.

Then, further examining the scene where Julia Roberts and her rich date are the only two people in the restaurant, I realized that we are literally at the exact table they were sitting at! We hadn’t even mentioned Mystic Pizza to the hostess who sat us here, so thanks for this bit of mystical movie magic goes to Rett’s mom, who, via control of the weather and other factors, guided her daughter right to the spot where a beautiful townie falls for a rich big-city guy. Funny how the almost-skipped-over movie location ended up being the best one for us!

We informed JT that he can now safely tell other diners that a “Mystic Pizza” scene was in fact shot in his restaurant, because a couple of obsessive nerds told him so. He had recommended the scallops for lunch, informing us in a no-bullshit way that Stonington is where all the scallops from the area come from. We’d had no idea, but it was true; they were some of the best scallops we’ve ever had. Which made our mystic “date” even more memorable!

Our final “Mystic Pizza” stop took us a bit off route, to the family homes of the three girls in the movie. Little did those hardworking backwater girls know that 25 years later, the world’s biggest pop star, Taylor Swift, would buy a house just a couple miles away!

Minutes later, we brought ourselves into Rhode Island, the eighteenth state of our nomadacy, and famously the smallest. Neither Rett nor I had ever been here in our lives, and I’d imagine its small size makes it frequently-missed on many peoples’ lists. Crossing one invisible border soon brought us across another one, that of the rain that had been falling over Rhode Island and eastern Massachusetts for days, but evaporating before it swirled west into Connecticut. It was enough to wet our clothes, but not soak fully through our shoes. Either way it meant arriving to camp during active rain, something we almost always avoid.

Burlingame Campground is almost incomprehensibly enormous. It apparently has 719 sites, though like the Connecticut parks, only a portion remain open for the last weeks of the season. Even with that cut-down supply, and even with it being a Saturday night, it was the third campsite of the stretch that we didn’t need to reserve; of the ~40 sites in our loop, maybe six were occupied (though it seemed like the weather probably kept away some who had made reservations).

The size of the campground meant that it was over a mile from the registration office to our site, so it sure would have been nice if the clerk had told us that the showers require quarters! (especially since I had even asked her if the bathhouse near us had showers!) I rode back out in the rain to the camp store that was much closer, except…they didn’t provide quarters. But, they said I could get them from the change machine at the arcade (this state park campground has an arcade?!?) which thankfully was only about 500 feet further. Then it wasn’t clear which quarter-taker was connected to which shower, and our paid-for water was barely warm, so Rhode Island was not making a good first-impression with their state parks!

Using the rainfly-first method, I was able to get the tent up completely dry, and thankfully the raindrops were never large enough to send grit from the sandy ground rebounding up onto it. We had our third no-cook dinner in a row, this one the most-intentional because we knew we would likely be eating inside the tent. The drizzle continued most of the evening, with a few breaks, but I was able to make good use of our tent’s “awning” feature to sit outside in my chair under cover while Rett stretched out inside.