Brown University is in Providence, Rhode Island. It is older than this country (founded 1764), and has a beautiful campus, elegant architecture, and hefty price tag. Sometimes I question if OSU was the right fit for me after touring places like Brown. No one was screaming or yelling at Brown, and nothing smelled like day-old vomit. It does have a pretentiousness about it, though.

This lamp-bear was on the campus of Brown. It is creepy. We left Brown after seeing this.

Connecticut is a strange state. All the state park and forest campsites close for the season, and you can’t camp anywhere unless you send in a written request two weeks in advance and receive a permit. Even the private campgrounds were closed. I’m not sure how the people who live here put up with this. Abbey and I crossed Connecticut off our list of places we might want to live simply because of this reason. That being said, the Connecticut State Parks are quite beautiful!

Mashamoquet State Park was a great place for a day hike with good scenery and trails. We pretty much had the place to ourselves. One trail leads to an old wolf den, where in 1742 an early settler “triumphantly” killed the last remaining wolf in Connecticut. The plaque said, I kid you not, “He dared to lead where others dared to follow,” and “by the light of her angry eyes shot and killed the marauder.” I fully realize those were different times, and settlers needed to protect their livestock, but it depresses me.

Once we were out of Connecticut, we stopped in Poughkeepsie, New York to walk over the longest pedestrian bridge in the world (6,768 ft!). The bridge was originally for trains, cost $3.5 million in the late 1800’s, and was (or rather, still is) a marvel of civil engineering. It is the oldest surviving steel cantilever bridge in the world, and when it was built, had the longest truss and cantilever spans in the world. It crosses the Hudson River, which flows in both directions because tides from the ocean flow roughly 70 MILES up river to this point. There are blue crabs in the river here, too!

After walking across the Hudson, we found a local brewery in a cool old building and stopped in for a couple beers.

Cheers!