Using Mystic as our home base, we spent four days exploring the Connecticut coast stopping in Old Lyme, Stonington and Newport.  In Newport, we visited two of the famous summer "cottages" built by the New England elite in the mid to late 1800s : The Breakers, a 70 room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo which was the Vanderbilt summer home; and the 1852 Victorian Chateau-sur-Mer, the first of the Gilded Age mansions built in Newport.  For rich New Englanders in the late 1800s, it appears that life was very much as described in The Great Gatsby. Mystic is filled with fine old homes built when it was a busy seaport.  The home of one our hosts  was built in 1860 for the Mystic Postmaster.  In Old Lyme, also known as the home of American Impressionism, we visited the Florence Griswold Museum.  Florence Griswold ran a boardinghouse popular with the artist community.  Many of her boarders (including Childe Hassan) used the house walls and door panels as their canvases.  The paintings are on view in the boardinghouse and definitely worth a visit.

Entrance to The Breakers, the Vanderbilt summer cottage in Newport.

Ruth's house, built in 1860 for Mystic Plumber and Postmaster, Parmenas Avery.

Stonington Harbor

One of many good restaurants in Stonington.