The Distracted Wanderer

Oftentimes while driving on Interstate 95 through southern Connecticut, I would always notice a sign near Exit 18 for the Connecticut 9-11 Memorial and think to myself that I should take the exit and stop in at the memorial. Unfortunately though I usually didn't have the time to do that as I was either on my way to someplace or coming back late from that place I'd just gone to. A trip planned to specifically see the memorial seemed to be in order so last week, on an unseasonably warm and beautiful January day, my friend Patti and I made the drive to the Greens Farms section of Westport where the memorial is located. As it turns out, the memorial is located at Connecticut's oldest State Park - Sherwood Island State Park which covers just about 235 acres and provides a place for visitors to enjoy various outdoor sports, study nature, picnic, fly kites or model airplanes, stroll along the beach on Long Island Sound, or maybe just relax and soak up a little sun which a lot ...

Much of my distracted wanderings take me in search of places of a historic nature - sites of former battles, covered bridges, lighthouses that have guided ships in from sea for years, houses where famous people once lived ... that sort of thing - but there's nothing in my own guidebook that says I can't go to places of more recent historic undertakings and that's exactly what I did this past Saturday when I traveled to East Haven to visit Sugar Bakery & Sweet Shop . What makes this modest-looking storefront on Main Street historic isn't that it's been in business for hundreds of years or that it's located in a old building that once housed some other historic business or that it has provided baked goods for historic figures with a sweet tooth.  Oh no, what makes this modest-looking storefront historic is that it's the home of the 2010 Food Network Cupcake Wars winners - a feat that has no doubt gone down in the historic annals of East Haven, a town th...

I hope the folks in Salem, Massachusetts know just how lucky they are! Not only do they have some of the coolest history in America right in their own backyards but they are also blessed to have been the place where in 1799 the East India Marine Society was formed - an organization whose charter included a provision for the establishment of a “cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities”  which was made up of a diverse collection of objects that society members, as captains and supercargoes of ships which had sailed beyond either the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, brought back with them to Salem. Those "natural and artificial curiosities” came from all sorts of points around the globe including Asia, Africa, India, Oceania, and the northwest coast of America and were the beginning of what is known today as the Peabody Essex Museum  - one of the oldest continuously operating museums in the United States with holdings of about 1.3 million pieces as well as twenty-four...