Connecticut (Pez & Yale) (06.12.22)

(This post was written by Jonathan. All opinions expressed herein are the opinions of Jonathan. And No one else. Ever. By reading, you agree that you do so at your own risk and you understand and agree that no persons associated with this post have any liability to you for any injury or loss you may suffer in connection with any content posted here. Jill assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content of this post. The information contained in this post is provided on an “as is” basis with no guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness. Thank you. And thank you Jonathan for writing this post. 😘)

Welcome to Connecticut!

Why, you are asking, are we in Connecticut? Well, It’s quite simple: we needed a place to stay overnight on our way from Washington DC to Maine.

(Jill here: The East coast is weird. We drove 10ish hours from D.C. to our Airbnb in Maine and in that time we went through 8 states: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine. Weird.)

You know how as a newly-married couple, you eat canned chili off a frisbee using a broken pair of sunglasses for a spoon? (A little Parks and Recreation reference for you)

(Of course you know what I’m talking about — every new couple does that, right? Guys?)

And then one day, you go to your friends’ house and they have really nice plates and you think to yourself “Maybe it’s time to retire the frisbee and buy real dishes?”

Anyway, we’ve recently gone through that same process with hotels. We’ve stayed in a couple of “eating-chili-off-a-frisbee” type hotels recently and we’ve decided we would rather spend the extra money on decent places. 

All this is to stay that we stayed at the Hampton Inn in Milford, Connecticut. The hotel was lovely. We stayed up late eating Dominoes Pizza, slept in for a bit in the morning, then ate breakfast and headed out.

We booked the hotel before planning any activities in Connecticut and it turns out that there’s not really a lot to do besides see Yale in New Haven. So we decided to keep our visit short, go check out Yale briefly and then be on our way.

The kids were less than thrilled at the prospect of visiting a University campus. But in fairness to them, they’ve never visited a university before (that they can remember). So, over their protests, we headed out. 

BUT THEN! As we were driving along the highway towards New Haven, we saw a sign for the PEZ Factory Store. Then we saw another one. And then a sign saying “Exit now for the PEZ Factory Store.”

So we took the exit. 

Truth be told, it was a really weird sensation for us to go check something out we hadn’t researched beforehand, but we have taken many happy trips to the Jelly Belly Factory in California, so we just decided to go for it.

Okay, the PEZ factory store is amazing.

Admission was about $35 for all of us, but you immediately get about 50% of your ticket admission in store credit. So, it was really $14 entry and we were encouraged to spend $14 at the store. 

It was SO COOL. There was a huge collection of PEZ dispensers and a whole bunch of interactive exhibits talking about the history of PEZ. There was also a scavenger hunt for the kids where you had to find dispensers based off partial, zoomed-in pictures. They had a great time hunting for dispensers and looking around at all the things.

A few of our favorite dispensers:

The Factory Store is also attached to the packaging area, so you could see all the equipment where they package the candy and dispensers. It was all closed down today, but they had TVs showing videos of what it would normally look like. 

We looked around upstairs at PEZ uniforms from the 30’s and destroyed all the records on the touch screen matching games (Jill here- no machines were harmed in the making of this memory. He means that they won. Most thoroughly.)

And then we headed to the store area and loaded up on many PEZ products (Sour PEZ in bulk is amazing). (The sour pez are Jill’s favorite, and now they are everyone else’s favorite too)

We then went outside and instructed the kids in the ancient tradition of loading PEZ dispensers and eating them with unseemly haste. 

For anyone in the New Haven area, we highly recommend the PEZ Factory Store. 

We got back in the car and continued off towards Yale in high spirits. The kids were much more willing to try out a University now that they had gotten to eat their weight in PEZ.

We arrived at Yale and the first thing that struck us was how seamlessly it blended with the rest of the city. It really is just right there in the middle of downtown!

We parked the car and wandered through a small section of the campus just to get a feel for the architecture and things. 

The kids had a great time wandering around on the grass and dipping their hands in water features. The campus was pretty quiet because graduation had just taken place. We saw a lot of students with suitcases and a few moving trucks in evidence. 

By now, it was getting to be late lunchtime and the yams were starting to lose their minds a little bit. 

(Side note: you know, we really do treat the twins like the ocean — we live our lives in sync with their rhythms and whims. Sometimes it is stormy, other times calm. But we are ever at their mercy.)

We had been aiming towards the University Bookstore, which happens to be next to a small shopping area with a few restaurants. So we decided to try our luck with “Yorkside Pizza and Restaurant” based on the fact that it had pizza.

[PICTURES COMING SOON. OUR INTERNET IN MAINE IS PARTICULARLY BAD]

We got two tables and ordered food. When it arrived, we realized that we maaaaay have underestimated the portions of the place. Clara’s alfredo pasta could have served our entire family and Jill’s Salad could have been used as a centerpiece at the Cassinat Thanksgiving celebration! 

We should have known better, you know? Any restaurant right across the street from a University that’s been open since the 50’s has got to serve enough so each order yields leftovers. 

Anyway, it was delicious and everyone felt much better about life afterwards. 

We also had many many leftovers. So Jonathan and the twins walked back to the car to change diapers and move the car while Jill and the older kids went to the bookstore.

The bookstore was great. It was pretty obvious that they were in between semesters because the entire textbook section was empty. But there was a great children’s section and we sat and read happily. 

Clara also found several $60 books about birds that she has now added to her ever-growing list of “books I’ll buy when the nomad year is over.”

It turns out that we’ve really missed physical books. 

After we had our fill of the Bookstore, we headed out again and drove to Maine.

We arrived, nearly got eaten by mosquitos moving from car to house and went right to bed.

Welcome to Maine!