Connecticut to New York (July 14)

We planned to do the drive from Concord to Virginia in 2 easy days rather than attempting to do it in one hard day. So, we pulled out my trusty lighthouse maps, put the coordinates into my street atlas program, and headed down the road.



We took the safe way out of Boston - went north to I-495 and avoided the beltway (which is pretty bad most of the time and terrible during rush hour. We really had good success until we got to Avery (you can see this all at http://www.lighthousesrus.org/RICT.htm#CT1). When we got there, our directions were convoluted and drove around and drove around and finally gave up. As we were driving back north to the bridge to New London, I spotted New London Ledge (out in the water), so I parked the car to get a photo of it.


When I got over to the wall to take this photo, I saw that I could also get a good photo of New London harbor from the same place, so got 2 things at once. When I got back in the car, Marnie commented that this sounded like a reference place in our directions, so we did a quick U-turn, and sure 'nuf, there was the Avery light we'd been trying to find in the first place.

This really is just a faux light - built by UConn to look nice, but it does look nice, so is recorded as such.

The next stop was Coney Island, so we headed into New York. The driving wasn't too bad, but it was 5:00 before we got to the light. This light is inside a gated community, and it took several tries to find the gate that allowed visitors in (and then all they did was take a photo copy of our ID). So we got that light too.

Finding a motel on Staten Island was not as much fun. The first place we tried specialized in rooms by the hour, the second one (which I took) was not as clean we'd like and turned out not to have air conditioning. But it worked. After dinner, we went out and got two more lighthouse photos (better than sitting in the room (see http://www.lighthousesrus.org/NewYorkE.htm#NY44)).

The fun story was our stop at the Staten Island Range Light (below).

We got this photo, then looped down a block to see if I could do better (I couldn't). While wandering around the street trying to find a good view point, a local came out asking if I was looking to find the light. I explained that we'd already found the light and were just looking for a better view, and then we had about a 10 minute conversation about some of the lost and strayed who have wandered around her street looking.