811. Essex, Lower Connecticut River Valley COG (CT7)

Once again, like in Sandy Hook, the COG office was in a house instead of an office building. I give it points for being more attractive than some random office block, but otherwise it was nothing special. The cache was equally un-special, a magnetic plate attached to a light pole. To highlight its un-specialness, in our haste to get back on the road, I forgot to photograph it.

Brilliant explosions of color, reds and oranges and yellows, had been bursting out from the green of the forests, like fireworks appearing in slow motion, continuing the annual war with chlorophyll. They contrasted sharply with the drab but comfortable gray that had been hanging over us all day. The clouds and rain, however, had begun to exact their toll on us. People were getting tired, and we would soon be running out of sunlight, so hard decisions would have to be made. In the end, they were not that hard. The original plan had been to complete Connecticut and Rhode Island in one day. It was only fourteen counties. How difficult could that be? The answer turned out to be “more so than originally thought.” While I have easily done more than that in one day, I did it alone, not with an entourage. Further, while the likes of Oklahoma and Kansas are flat and wide open, Connecticut is not. And the Constitution State certainly does not have the Lord’s own speed limits like Texas has. We all agreed Rhode Island would wait for another day. I would have liked to go home with five more counties and another whole state under my belt, but Connecticut was my primary reason for coming to the Northeast, so I kept my eyes on the proverbial prize. A price would be paid for this decision: we would not have time to eat at the famed Mystic Pizza (which would have been nice but not a big deal).  More importantly, we would not visit the Connecticut County Challenge (which was a much bigger deal). I didn’t realize that at the time, though. My ambitions are without limit (my abilities, maybe not so much), but the needs of my compatriots were (mostly) more important than my own selfish desires. So, we drove and got caught behind an accident on I-95 that sucked up half an hour of precious daylight, making it dark once we hit the outskirts of…