30.4 mi / 10.8 mph / 836 ft. climbing
Home: Hammonasset Beach State Park

On our way out of New Haven, we crossed Yale’s campus one final time. We also crossed I-95 for the sixteenth time in our last three rides, but that would also be the final time (for today). Here the Interstate runs a bit more inland, so we were able to do the winding-around-the coast thing without winding ourselves around the northeast’s main thoroughfare.

Despite our layoff, the riding felt easy. It helped knowing that the day was statistically easier than anything we had in New York. The built-environment was indeterminate: there was plenty of housing, but it felt neither like we were going through small New England towns, nor through the suburbs of a larger city.

Just as Rett was saying that she could stop for lunch, we returned to a waterfront section at Indian Neck, and a bench appeared with perfect timing. I had a sandwich, and Rett some of her Smashed Chickpea Salad, that we both brought with us from “home”.

After lunch, we finally got some of those “New England small towns” that had been conspicuous by their absence. The way the the houses sat just inches from the edge of the road immediately communicated “colonial”, and created a retroactive contrast with the “modern” houses built with big-setback zoning rules that we had passed all morning. Many of the oldest houses had signs with years on them, and 1744 was the earliest we saw (more than 100 years older than the very oldest buildings in New Zealand!) Guilford was the first historic town center our route took us through, with the Main Street cuteness augmented by a large New Haven-style park with the diagonal-crossing paths checked across it.

Earlier, we took advantage of the unpaved Branford Trolley Trail for a couple miles to give us a direct cut across a marshy bay rather than being forced to return inland to cross via the road bridge. The fact that we had to cross some large puddles on the trail wasn’t too much of a surprise, but later on, we had a couple sections of road that were flooded with five or six inches of water for fifty yards or more. On her first bike tour, Rett couldn’t ride across inch-deep puddles on the Indiana Dunes Trail, so it was amazing to watch her ride the centerline of the road, leaving a big wake behind her, intrepidly leading the way with me following behind. I thought it was strange how places that must flood every high tide didn’t have big “Road May Flood” signs warning about it, but later on learned that there was a Coastal Flooding Advisory. A big low-pressure system has been stalled off Cape Cod for days, sucking the ocean upward, with its rotating winds also piling the ocean into Long Island Sound, and also, a full moon maximizing the high tides. Honestly we’re lucky we didn’t need to do a big detour anywhere!

The post-Labor Day off-season meant that we did our first arrival in forever to a campground without having a reservation. Even if we hadn’t rolled in before 3pm, it still would have been no problem getting a site; usage drops off so much that large sections of the campground have been closed for the season, and the remaining parts are still less than half-full. Check-in was so much easier than the bureaucratic complexity of New York State Parks, and the clerk even gave us the best site, arched over by Elven trees in an otherwise-nearly-treeless campground. I was a bit concerned because the map showed the site was right next to a bit of marsh, and there are warnings in the area about mosquitos carrying the super-deadly Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), but she said the mosquito population has mostly disappeared with the cooler weather, and that was completely true.

Thanks to the population density of Connecticut, Rett’s phone had no problem handling her doctor’s appointment via Zoom, to renew some prescriptions; all part of the complexities of nomadic life. After dinner (again pasta leftovers we brought from “home”, what a luxury!), our easy day meant that Rett finally had the time and energy to explore a bit of the park, and we walked down to the beach for the sunset.