In which we discuss:

• Our summer plans.
• “Best Towns” lists and where we’d live if we didn’t live where we live now.
• The new Hartford Line.
• How to avoid crowds while traveling in busy seasons.

 

Summary

In this episode, Johnna and Kerri chat about summer goals, give the side-eye to lists that rank Connecticut towns, and ponder where we’d live if we didn’t live where we live now. Other topics of discussion: Kerri’s experience riding the new Hartford Line, and how to be a tourist in the summer without having to deal with, you know, all those other tourists.

Special Moments

See if your town made one of the lists mentioned in this episode:

Movoto: 10 Best Places to Live in Connecticut

RoadSnacks: 10 Worst Places to Live in Connecticut for 2018

Connecticut Magazine: Rating the Towns 2015

Connecticut Magazine: Terrific Towns 2017

And if you live in Manchester:

Money: This Is the Best Place to Live in Every State

Kerri mentioned that Manchester has some great parks. Not mentioned specifically was Johnna’s favorite – she even wrote a blog post about it four years ago –  Wickham Park, which Money should have cited instead of that board game thing. Walkscore also came up as a better way to evaluate a potential new home.

Kerri sampled the new Hartford Line on its free, opening weekend and provides an early review of the train experience, along with her impressions of transit-oriented development and wayfinding around the three main stations. An improvement, sure, but there’s room for service expansion.

We think it’d be wise for the towns and cities with rail stations to promote the Hartford Line on their municipal or tourism websites. How are they doing now when it comes to promoting a variety of ways for people to reach these municipalities? Springfield does not provide any travel directions, and curiously, the Basketball Hall of Fame only offers directions for those arriving by car. Hartford’s tourism page sort of mentions the Hartford Line. If the Windsor Locks town page has any directions on it, we couldn’t find them. The town of Windsor’s site froze on a giant, pulsing teal star when our Internet went crazy; on a second attempt we saw that their site features a video of ducks. After some struggle, we found that Windsor does provide multimodal directions, though the site has not been updated to include CTrail.  It took some digging to find Berlin’s directions, and those were car only. Meriden’s town page only mentions driving directions and parking in downtown; one of the lots is for commuter rail, so that seems to be how one learns about train service in this town. Wallingford’s directions were easy to locate, but alas, only offered instructions for drivers. Though it does not name CTrail specifically, New Haven wins for having the most comprehensive travel instructions, which happen to be published in the center of the home page.

 

Music: “Below the Waves” by Keshco