Wow, it’s been a while since I started this blog. Our oldest children are grown up, and our youngest are just getting ready to graduate. Because they were so young, they don’t remember this trip as well as their older siblings. It would have been impossible to duplicate. But we decided before they graduated, maybe we could add one more stop that we never fit in back then. We took them back to Boston for a couple of days. It was so amazing! So the next couple days are what I would have inserted in the trip between Waterloo, NY and New York City (between Day 22 and 23) in our trip back in 2012.
Yale, Hartford Connecticut
We caught a plane in Salt Lake City at 11:35 pm on July 24. It had us landing 6 am in New Jersey. So the only sleep we all got was what little we could get on the plane. We started the day up and running.
A view of NY City as we headed to Connecticut.
We rented a car and drove from Newark, New Jersey to New Haven, Connecticut where we visited Yale’s campus. The campus is absolutely beautiful. They give free tours, but we were running late and just stopped and asked a tour guide what the best buildings were to visit. The tour guide was super great and pulled out a map to show us the best places to visit on campus if we like old things.
He suggested we visit Harkness Tower
and the Old Campus (although that part was under some construction, so we could only see a bit of it).
The guide told us the Art Gallery and the Sterling Memorial Library were free to visit. They were both worth the stop. The Library was absolutely beautiful!
But my favorite building was by far the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the literary archive and special collections of Yales. It is one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to rare books and manuscripts. Here we saw one of the first printings of the Declaration of Independence and a copy of the Gutenberg Bible dating about 1454. I loved this library!
All of the libraries we visited had free entrance and were worth a visit.
The guide told us if we like old things, we’d want to walk or drive down Hillshouse Avenue. We drove down Hillhouse Avenue which according to both Mark Twain AND Charles Dickens … is a walk down the most beautiful street in America. It’s a tree-lined avenue, located in the heart of campus with 19th-century mansions-turned-Yale-buildings and classroom spaces.
Hartford, Connecticut
Next stop Mark Twain’s home. According to the guide at the time Mark Twain lived in this home he had built, Hartford Connecticut was the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. And his neighborhood (Nook Farm) was the wealthiest neighborhood in the U.S. If I remember correctly, some famous artists that lived in this community: the Governor, US Senators, newspaper publishers, a noted Civil War general, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Augustus D. Julliard.
In this home Mark wrote the Adventures of Huck Finn and Life on the Mississippi. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside. Louis Comfort Tiffany was an artist that painted inside the home (later future owner of Tiffany’s). Many different cultures and styles from around the world are represented in the décor. New technologies were also found in the home like gravity flow heat systems, flushing toilets and a telephone.
Boston Massachusetts Temple
After Mark Twain’s home we drove to Boston to go to the temple. Hannah and I went to an endowment session. We tried to get a reservation for Ben and Mike to do baptisms, but I thought the lack of a time slot, meant they were full. We hoped that Ben could walk in, and they could fit him in. Instead, the baptistry was closed and no one was there. But when they heard that Ben had come for baptisms, they opened up the baptismal font and let them do baptisms. They were so nice. It’s a small temple with limited hours. But it was very beautiful, and it was wonderful to be there.
godncountry 