Mt. Tom State Park

We set the alarm for 6:30 this morning as we knew we needed to get an earlier start if we wanted to do all the things we wanted to, and get to our nephew Jordon’s house between 4:00 and 5:00. We did pretty good and got out the door by 8:20. I took the time to cut up our cheese and even sample some with breakfast. It was pretty good. I probably would enjoy a little less sharper cheese, but it was still good. We had bought a yogurt cup at the grocery store the night before so I was able to wash it out since I had eaten it for breakfast, and put all of the cut cheese in it and seal it with the cover. It worked out pretty good.

Even though we had been in Massachusetts at the beginning of the trip, I didn’t do any geocaches when we were in Salem, so I made a point to grab one first thing this morning. It was not far down the road from where we were staying in a guardrail. We kept pressing on and I continued to look for caches to do along the way while Tom drove. I knew we couldn’t spend as much time as we did yesterday so I was pretty picky in what I was looking for. As we drove into Great Barrington, MA I noticed the post office and had Tom pull over so I could mail back the parking pass we forgot the day before. It cost me less then $2.00 for the envelope and the postage. We were in such a cute part of downtown I pulled out the geocaching app and noticed there was one across the street at the library. The GPS had me searching in the wrong location, but I was able to come up with the find. We stopped at one other guardrail cache to ensure I got a Connecticut cache.

The next stop was Mt. Tom State Park in Lichtfield, CT. I’m not going to lie, I was looking at my “Best Road Trips in America” book and when I saw there was a park with Tom’s name in it, I thought we must stop there. The previous day I had looked up the park online and knew there was about a mile and a half hike to the summit with a tower on top. When we pulled into the park I was disappointed to not see a big welcome sign. We did find parking and the trailhead for the Tower Trail, but I still wasn’t sure we were in the right spot due to lack of signage. Looking at the GPS there was what looked to be another entrance into the park on the other side, so I had Tom drive around (took probably 10 minutes on a single lane gravel road . . .here we go again) just to find it was not another entrance. Back down the single lane gravel road back to where we were. This time we looked at the map that was posted on the little welcome shack that nobody was working at. Yeah, we were in the right spot the first time. I had tried to pull the same map up before we made the extra drive but I didn’t have any cell reception in the area and we didn’t stop to look at it before we made the extra drive. Also since I didn’t have any cell reception, I wasn’t able to look at the geocaching map to see if there was a cache in the park. We took a picture of the trail map and made our way back to the trail head and started the climb up Mt. Tom. Of all the hikes we’ve done on this trip, this one was pretty easy (or maybe we are just getting used to climbing mountains?). It felt like we made it to the top in no time at all. Maybe that’s because we agreed we wouldn’t take any pictures until we got to the top. At the top, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were stairs inside the tower for us to actually ascend to the top and view out. I guess this would be similar to the observation towers in most of the WI state parks I’ve been too, but this one was just disguised in a medieval looking stone structure. The 360 degree view was ok. At least it was a bright clear day!! I descended first so I could get a picture of Tom peering over the top of the tower. As I waited for him to come down I realized since we were up so high that I once again had cell reception. After making sure I had directions to our next stop, I pulled open the geocaching app and found that I was 129 feet from a cache! Tom was taking awhile to come down and when he did I found out it was because he was scratching our mark into the wood stair case. I dragged him the 129 feet towards the cache. As I was searching the area, he was surfing his phone. I was getting frustrated that it was taking me longer then I felt it should, when I turned around and there it was! Yay I found it! This made the trip to Mt. Tom State Park even more worth it. I logged the cache and then we headed back down the trail. For once, the time we estimated that we needed at the park was about spot on, if not a little less then estimated.

Since we were a little ahead of schedule I found we had enough time to head over to Kent Falls State Park. Here there was a short hike to see the base of the falls, and then a stairway path going up along side the falls. We started heading up and we were surprised that it just kept going and going. The falls are actually a series of a bunch of falls that just kept cascading down. We would get to one lookout point, look up and see there was another platform above us. It felt like it never ended, but we eventually did make it to the top of the falls and was able to see the stream that feeds into it. We did a quick look around and headed back down. I’m glad we had enough time to make this stop.

From Kent Falls State Park the GPS said it was about an hour and 45 minutes to Jordon’s home town and that would put us there about 3:45. That is right around the time Tom wanted to be there, so we got on the road and headed straight there with the only stop being for gas. We arrived at Jordon’s house about 4:02 and spent about an hour and a half talking with Jordon, his Grandpa, and his mom before we left to go to dinner. Jordon had a great idea to go indoor go-karting after dinner, but it was about 45 minutes away from his house and going in the direction of where we were staying in Westerly, RI. So he came up with the plan that he would also drive so we wouldn’t have to back-track and take him home when we were done. We ate at a Mexican restaurant called Cuckoo’s Nest (https://www.cuckoosnest.biz/) and then drove to Foxwood’s Casino which is where the Go Karting was (http://monzakarting.com/). There was nobody else there so we were able to have the course to ourselves. The race was 8 minutes long and we were really competing for who would have the fastest lap. Jordon had been here at least 5 other times, so he definitely had a leg up on us and it showed. He whooped us! Tom’s kart acted up a couple of times during the session, so they actually extended our track time by a couple of extra minutes. It was a lot of fun and Tom and Jordon went a second time. Again Jordon had the fastest time and even beat his best time from the previous session. When we were done go-karting we walked around the massive casino. It felt good to walk off dinner. By the time we said our goodbyes to Jordon it was 9:30. We got to our hotel on the ocean in Westerly, RI at 10:00. The sun doesn’t rise until 7:06a.m. so even though we’re heading to bed late, we are setting an alarm to watch it since we have a perfect view from our balcony.

Stats of the Day:

Gas: $3.39/gallon
Jordon’s Fastest Lap: 44.375 seconds
Tom’s Fastest Lap: 47.588 seconds
Jess’s Fastest Lap: 55.813 seconds
Geocaches Attempted: 5
Geocaches Found: 4
Steps Walked: 13,803