Our next main stop after Mystic was Portland Maine, however it is a bit of a drive. So we found a few things in the in-between that might be interesting to see and decided on a night in Concord New Hampshire. This is the chronicle of our drive from Mystic to Concord.  As a side note if you don’t have a blog you may not realize that there are some SUPER annoying rules that have to be followed in order for google and other search engines to pick up your content. One of them is repeating the exact title of your article many times in the body as well as making sure they are bold, italic and underlined, which is why sometimes I have to write super cheesy dumb things. Moving on.

Mystic to Concord was one of the more interesting aspects of your trip in that I knew approximately nothing about this part of New England and thus had zero expectations. The night before we left I found a abandoned hospital building that I wanted to drive by. So before hitting the road properly we stopped at ‘Young Buns’ in Mystic which had gluten free doughnuts. Thus heading out armed with sugar and coffee we made our way to our first stop in Waterford Connecticut, the Seaside Sanitorium. The hospital was built in the 1930s in the Tudor Revival style as a children’s tuberculosis facility, though they also had wards dedicated to elderly and mental care. It was two buildings a rather beautiful but smaller dorm style building and a larger more hopsital like facility that had some less than lovely additions to it over the years. The hospital began to fall into disuse as early as the 1940s because of advancements in TB treatment, after which it became a full time elderly care hospital until the 60s. After which it became a rather notoriously known mental facility which was shut down in the 90s due to irrefutable evidence of abuse and mistreatment. In 2014 the property was bought by the state with the intention preserving it as a state park and land mark. Today the buildings remain untouched and gated but the grounds were very lovely. We enjoyed our coffee and doughnuts and the carried on our merry way.

After Waterford we took a detour around New Haven to look at Yale. Unfortunately the entire campus was closed off to visitors and the weather was not terribly friendly. We took a couple loops admiring what we could see and then hit the road again with a more substantial meal on our mind. We ended up finding a brunch location in Hartford. Hartford looked like a really cool town and I wish we could have had more time to look around but we had a lot of miles to put under us so we kept moving toward Concord. About halfway through the day we stopped at an Aldi’s in Worcester. Another town I wish we had more time to explore. All I really got was the view from the freeway but the density of turn of the century brick building made for quite a sight.

We finally got to Concord around dinner time. Which gave us about an hour to explore the area a bit before we lost light. The most interesting thing I randomly found was a rather large First Church of Christ Scientist, or Christian Science. You have probably seen Christian Science reading rooms around, it seems like most towns have them but this was the first church I have ever stubbled on. Mary Baker Eddy the founder was from Boston so I suppose it shouldn’t have been a suprise that the churches would be more prominent on the East Coast. If you don’t know much about the movement but have any fascination with weird twisted history I would highly suggest doing some digging. If you can handle really crude jokes ‘The Last Podcast on the Left’ has an excellent series on her. Our real reason for stopping in Concord was to seen the State House, which happens to be oldest state capitol in which both houses of the legislature meet in their original chambers. It was a beautiful building though not exactly showing off on such a grey day. And sadly as is the theme of so many trips the last couple years, closed for pandemic reasons.

We had a nice dinner in an Irish Pub type place, hit the local book store and then made our way back to the Hampton Inn Concord/Bow hotel. It turned out to be one of my favorite hotels. Very newly remolded, quiet, clean and easy to find. All in all our very long drive from Mystic to Concord was a success. Next stop was Portland Maine.