So, Steve and I decided to drive to our Principal Speaker gig at PhilCon in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, because. . .new car, mostly, and also? If we drove, rather than take the train, and left a day early, we could stop in Bristol, Connecticut and take a couple hours to tour the New England Carousel Museum, which I’ve been trying to figure out how to accomplish for years, by which I mean, “before Carousel Tides was published.”
Bold scheme formed, we deliberately drove into Connecticut, through Hartford, which I never willingly do, and so to Bristol, where we found the museum right where we were promised it would be, at 95 Riverside Avenue (Rt 72).
We’d budgeted a couple hours for the tour. Honestly, we should have budgeted a whole day. Still we had a blast, and our tour guide, Cindy Mulcahy, added much to the experience, with her enthusiasm and obvious love of all things carousel.
We rushed madly about, trying to see All The Things, and took, like, a zillion pictures (with permission). Instead of overburdening this space with them, I collected the pictures off of my camera into a Pinterest album, right over here.
The moral of the story is: If you are or find yourself on the East Coast of the United States, and you have even a small interest in carousels/carousel animals/carousel art/the science of restoration, you will find it worth your while to go to the New England Carousel Museum.
And, if one of you is a sports fan and the other is a carousel fan, the sports person could go see ESPN HQ while the other toured the museum.