We hit a few of the Connecticut parks back in the fall of 2024, on our way to the parks in the southwest corner of Rhode Island, but most of our Connecticut visits have been in December, January, February, and March. we have a few more parks to visit around the Hartford area (and a few that were added to the list by people at the parks I was visiting asking “Oh. did you visit XYZ park yet?”). If you follow this page, you might meet us as we finish up the parks around Hartford – and then take a trip to catch the straggling (new) entries.
Like Vermont, Connecticut is more than an hour trip to the closest parks, and most of them are a 2+ hour trip for us to get started, so we are once again heading out the door around 5am – with the plan to get to the first park just after dawn.
Although we hit up a few of the Vermont parks after the snowfall – Connecticut was the state where we visited a whole series of parks in the ice and snow. So, I guess we’re going to have to revisit some of them once the weather improves.
Connecticut has also been a hard set for us to finish for reasons other than just distance – in our January trip, someone hit us and totaled the car (almost 200 miles from home). In February, Maizey went on bed-rest to recover from a knee injury from the ice (at home). However, on the plus side, the break did allow me to get some business cards to hand out to people when I explain why we’re visiting a park 3 hours from our house – which makes things seem much more “official”.
Many of the parks in Connecticut have been empty of other visitors during out trips. That makes each individual visit faster; because, after a walk around the park for me, and a sniff around the park for Maizey, we’re both ready to move on since there’s no one else to play with. Connecticut also has clusters of parks in adjacent towns (as you can see from the map, below). Interestingly, Bridgeport (which is the largest city in the state, by population) only had 2 parks – but Norwalk has 3 and New Haven has 6!
As we finish up the park visits, I do need to update the entries for the Connecticut park listings – because, even though I got the parks into the list, the details for most of them were still blank – but that should be completed by the first week in April.
In the map below, the towns with visited parks are marked in yellow. Parks which have not yet been visited are marked in green, and towns which are in the process of building a dog park have been marked in blue.
