Took our time driving up to New Haven today, via the dirty ugly smelly New Jersey Turnpike again.  I tell you something for nothing – that must be one of the more expensive bits of toll road that I’ve had the misfortune to need to use… it cost us $2.05 when we got off the Pennsylvannia Turnpike, $11.80 for using the New Jersey Turnpike, $13.10 for the George Washington Bridge and then another $1.25 when we got off somewhere else, I don’t know I lost track!

Still, glad we were going North, because the traffic going South was totally cactus! We made an unexpected stop at the PEZ factory as we made our way through Connecticut for a place to stretch our legs, but that is a whole other post as it is full of silly photos and stuff.

Anyway, we made it to New Haven just after lunch time and decided to go check out the B&B first up. We had booked to stay at The Farnam Guest House, which is a beautiful quaint old building on the north side of town on Prospect Street.The Farnam Room where we were staying for the night, also another bedroom whose occupants had not yet turned up for the evening, the main parlour and dining rooms were also gorgeous.
So, after we settled in we decided to go take a drive around town before heading to the centre of town to check out the University and the local shopping district. I have to say that I am finding Connecticut is absolutely my kind of town. I love the architecture here, I love the beautiful old houses, the buildings that belong to Yale are all gorgeous, and I can only imagine how lovely the place looks when it is all green with new foliage (I’ve said it everywhere we have been – but the North East REALLY needs more evergreens!), or even better, during the fall when the leaves are al turning. New Haven reminds me a lot of some of the university towns in England, Oxford, Cambridge etc… I am pretty sure that is no mistake. So we went on a bit of a real estate tour, checking out beautiful houses as we drove past 🙂The photos are a bit on the wonky side, but that is what you get for snapping out a moving car window with an iPhone!

After pottering around the suburbs a bit, we went down to the town centre which is is full of gothic style sandstone buildings, and of course, bulk Yale stuff everywhere you turn. My university sells a couple of hoodies, a jumper or two, some umbrellas and maybe a hat, some cufflinks and a compendium… Yale has several stores dedicated to merchandise and you can get Yale and Yale Bulldogs, printed on nearly anything! Even a garden gnome – and you know I totally would have bought one of these silly things home if it weren’t for the stupid airline’s luggage allowance rules. 😉I would have loved for it to be a little less cold, so that I could have done a bit more wandering around taking photos of the buildings, but as it was, it was hard to stay out of the car for more than five minutes together.
After checking out a little bit of pottering around town, we went for a drive to ferret out the Lighthouse, which we were assured is at the aptly named, Lighthouse Point. Only it turns out you can drive for ages around the shoreline in this area and NOT find a public access to the water. We could find the lighthouse in the distance, but it appeared the only place to get anywhere near it was a private, fenced off, boat ramp area. Oh well, a bit more driving round in circles and finding lots of dead end streets confirmed that suspicion. So we head off looking for any access to an area of East Haven beach, and we eventually found the one area that seemed to have parking and access to the beach – mind you, everywhere we looked there were signs up saying ‘No Parking, Residents Only, All Others Will Be Towed’. Enquiries a little bit later revealed that these signs only applied during peak season when the car parks were busy, and it was to make sure that East Haven residents could go park near the beach and keep the tourists out… no shit, it seems that there is so little public access to the beach, that they make it a priority to allocate parking for residents, and bugger the tourists! It makes no sense to me – surely if you live nearby you have some way of getting to the beaches?! But apparently not. Anyway, we parked by the beach by encroaching on a restaurant car park and went out there for… oh, about three minutes. Given it was *mumble mumble* below zero and the winds were apparently around 35MPH, it just was not pleasant at all, no matter how pretty the area was.
It was at about this point that we decided to resume our real estate tour of Connecticut, and keep checking out beautiful houses. The median price in New Haven is approximately $240,000 which sounds awesome if you ask me, even if many of these homes are considerably smaller than what we are used to back home. Obviously many of these houses might have been much more than that, but $240K for a property in East Haven, Connecticut close to beaches and all the amenities of New Haven? I think I have found somewhere I could handle living on the East Coast now – San Francisco being the only place I have found that I would consider living in, on the West Coast. 🙂 After a quick bite to eat (delicious and cheap lobster rolls… why, yes. I am planning on overdosing on all the fresh seafood while we are in New England!), at the Sandpiper restaurant with the handy carpark, we then tootled back the the guesthouse for a warm and toasty night in.