Connecticut - Day 11 - New Haven to Mystic via coastline

Mystic KOA
Sunday, 11 November 2018

today's route

Today I'm moving from Totoket Valley RV to the KOA, the other CT campground that's open through the winter.  But first to a New Haven legend.

Pepe's Pizza and Little Italy
I had read online that it's common to find long lines at Frank Pepe's Pizzaria Napoletana, so I decided to go early enough to be sure of finding a parking place, figuring I could walk the dogs around in the spare time.

Wooster Street

I found the pizza place, on Wooster St., is in the heart of New Haven's Little Italy.  You can see my RV parked a little way down the street in this photo on the left.  In the 3-block area, there are 6 Italian restaurants, including Pepe's.  The next street over, Chapel St., is packed with historic markers on all the houses.  And some of them are amazing, as you can see.

It must once have been a very wealthy district.  On the corner was a huge Catholic church (for all the Italians, I guess) complete with stone steeple with fretwork.  One of the blocks was covered by a green, where everybody in town was walking their dogs.  I saw an interesting sign there.

read about the Rochambeau route

I had to look all that up about the Rochambeau Route and found a chunk of history I knew nothing about.  It details the key aid French troops gave us during the Revolutionary War, without which we almost certainly would have lost to the British.  I wish our president knew about this before he started blasting the French this last week.  There's a lot on this link but you should read at least some of it.  www.nps.gov/rochambeau-revolutionary-route

So dogs have been walked and I'm still parked across the street from Pepe's and, at 10:45 there are already 2 dozen people in line for the 11:00 opening.  More arrived and there must have been at least 5 dozen by the time the doors opened.

People ordering to go, as I was, can wait at the counter and watch them make the pizzas.  A family was waiting there too, and I asked them to take a photo and email it to me, and the daughter did take the picture, but maybe she forgot to send it, because I still haven't received it.  I wanted it because they make the pizzas on wooden paddles with handles 12' long, and rest the handles on a cradle while they're putting the pizza together.  Then they shove it into the ovens, which they said are 14'x14', and they've got 3 of them.  They said they'll make 900-1200 pizzas on a given weekend day.  Incredible.  I have no idea at all how they can keep them straight once they're in the oven, because it looked to me like they just shoved them in any old way.  But in the 20 minutes or so I was there, I never saw them take out a burned one, and everybody seemed to be getting what they ordered.

I went here because it's one of the best known places in the state, famous for its white clam pizza.  Their pizzas are known as apizza, meaning they use a thin crust and a coal-fired oven, a style they originated.  I saw a number of pizza places in the New Haven area advertising themselves as selling "apizzas" and finally looked it up online, which is why I'm able to tell you this.  I understand the style is geographically limited but has spread to a few other places, such as Salvation Pizza in Austin.  Their pizzas are oblong-ish and not served by the slice - buy a whole one or don't buy one.  So I bought a whole one.

I just couldn't bring myself to commit to an entire white clam pizza so instead went for a sausage pizza, which I saw online as being great.  And this is what mine looked like.

And yes, it was really good.

I ate half of it in the RV (the rest for dinner), and when I left at almost noon, there was a long line and a stretch limo waiting at the curb - a long line even though the place seats 150.

I saw on the lousy AAA map that Rt. 146 runs along the coast for at least part of the way along, and that's what I was aiming for, but ran into a fork in the road that wasn't labeled at all and took a chance.  After winding along for what seemed like a long time, on a barely 2-lane road, I started to get nervous.  And then I suddenly found I was going to go under a railroad trestle and hadn't paid enough attention to the sign saying how much clearance there was, so got very nervous.  Fortunately, I saw a place to pull off the road and reassess, and that turned out to be a good spot. 

Hoadley Creek Preserve

"Lease dogs"

There was a trail back into the woods starting at the sign on the right, so I took the dogs back in there a little way, which they loved.  This marsh area on the left was the only cleared spot - the rest of it was forest, as on the right.

There were informational signs posted there.  One said deer hunting season was in full swing (so I wore the reflective vest I always wear when walking the dogs in the dark).  The other had a list of rules; the first 4 were: -use blazed trails only; -do not disturb plants or animals; -lease dogs; -build no fires.  I assumed #3 was a typo and decided it was okay if I leashed my dogs instead.

When we got back, I had time to watch the other traffic go under the trestle (there was a surprising amount of traffic, considering it was a Sunday and a country road), and there was obviously plenty of headroom for my RV, so we kept on going.  Turned out I'd accidentally stumbled on Rt. 146 back at that fork.

The next town on the road was Guilford, an agricultural community since 1639 (their sign says).  I passed Sam Hill Road and remembered something I'd seen in the AAA guidebook: Sam Hill was a local resident who ran for public office every chance he got - resulting in the expression "run like Sam Hill."  I've never heard that expression, but my dad used to say "what in the Sam Hill . . ." - usually about something dumb one of us kids was doing.  Same guy?

I passed a peapod-shaped vehicle going the other way, and was very glad it wasn't going my way.  It was driving on the shoulder, for one thing, and was about the size of a go-cart so would have been hard for drivers to see.  You couldn't have paid me enough to drive that thing out on the road - way way too dangerous.  And it looked so small I'd think the driver must have been about go-cart age.  Weird.

I went through the village of Westbrook (est. 1635) and passed a lovely building.  I had to get this photo off the internet, and it's not as detailed as I'd wish.

Those cornerstones or keystones or lintels or whatever you call the pieces above the windows are actually carved with scroll-y designs - really pretty.  I think the building is now used as the local historical society.

Rt. 146 seemed to merge with US Rt. 1, or at least I lost the state route somewhere.  I wanted to see more than the interstate would show me, but it was hard to stay off it.  In fact, when I got to Old Saybrook I had no choice but to get on the highway - the Connecticut River insisted on the right of way.

I keep hearing news on the radio about the fires in California.  At the rate they're going, there won't be much left of the state for me to visit in 3 years.  I sure hope they can figure out how to short-circuit this ghastly pattern they're developing of droughts, then forest fires, then torrential rains and mudslides - not to mention earthquakes, which I guess is all they're missing.  Poor people.  What a mess for them.

The KOA people were really nice and, when I couldn't easily get into the site they gave me, let me have another, that turned out to be on a slant, so they gave me a third, which I figured I'd better take before their patience ran out.  Most of their campground is closed for the winter - odd to see so many vacant spaces and not have my choice of place to stay.  But where I am is fine.