I am continuing my trek down the East Coast. Today we visited Mystic Seaport in Mystic, CT. It seems when most people hear of Mystic, their first thought is of the movie Mystic Pizza starring an early Julia Roberts. So lets get that photo out of the way first.
Mystic Seaport is one of those museum villages much like Strawbery Banke, but this one had a special emphasis on ships and ship building. It is the largest maritime museum in the world. It had the usual old, historic houses and shops, like a grocery, druggist, tavern, school and churches…
but it also had shops particular to the being a seaport, like a hoop shop to make hoops for the sails, a cooperage for making barrels, and an oyster house.
My favorite part was the Charles W. Morgan whaling boat, the only surviving wooden whaling ship. These whaling boats would go out for years at a time, harvesting the blubber of whales.
This was the captain’s quarters…
And there was a special cabin for the captain’s wife so she didn’t have to stay below the deck.
As you can see by the description below, she was not enamored with life on the sea.
They had bunks for all the ship mates, which looked smaller than most coffins I’ve seen. Another interesting thing about these bunks was that the museum holds a summer sailing camp for kids, and this is where all the kids sleep during camp. Yikes!
Another building I liked was where they displayed ship figureheads.
Besides the seaport village, they had a shipbuilding area where they were restoring several old ships. This was the ship they were currently working on outside. It had a tent-like covering over the top.
That restoration was going on outside, and several more boats where being restored inside.
After the Seaport, we had dinner in downtown Mystic, a very narrow and crowded town. They give you mussels and clams before they bring out the lobster.
With this leg of the trip, I was able to add Rhode Island and Connecticut to my state map. I almost lost the stickers because they were so small. The map is getting pretty full!
