Why this ride
Classic New England towns and old stone walls on a nationally recognised byway. The road: CT-169. Distance and riding time are estimates from the checkpoints until the road is measured on this page.
CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Quiet Corner Route 169
Plan this ride
- Recorded distance
- 508 km
- Riding-time estimate
- 7 h 25
- Journey
- Recorded itinerary
Distance and timing basis
The recorded total and the leg detail need reconciliation. Inspect the leg notes before using this record for timing or navigation. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. Norwich
Norwich calls itself the Rose of New England, a nickname dating from the days when its elms and gardens drew admiration, and it sits at a point where geography did the planning. Two rivers, the Yantic and the Shetucket, meet the Quinebaug at the head of tide here and form the Thames, which runs down to Long Island Sound. That meeting made Norwich a port and a mill town, and the hilly streets above the harbor are still lined with big Victorian houses that hint at its old industrial wealth.
2. Sterling
Sterling is the Massachusetts town where Mary had a little lamb, and the town knows it. In the early nineteenth century a girl named Mary Sawyer is said to have carried a pet lamb to school, and the poem that followed has made the village a minor place of pilgrimage, with a lamb statue standing in the centre. Beyond the nursery rhyme, Sterling is a quiet, comfortable farm and commuter town of about seven thousand people, set among rolling hills and orchards on the eastern side of the Wachusett Mountain country, with South Lancaster a short ride to the east.
3. Canterbury
4. Fitchburg
5. Pomfret
6. Woodstock
Woodstock, Connecticut, has a pink house, and the pink house tells you a lot. Roseland Cottage was built in 1846 for Henry Bowen, a New York merchant and publisher, in a fanciful Gothic Revival style and painted a vivid rose that has never gone out of fashion. Bowen used it as a summer base and held Fourth of July celebrations on the lawn that drew four sitting presidents over the years, among them Ulysses Grant and William McKinley. It is now a museum, and the gardens and bowling alley are as charming as the house.
7. Back to Norwich
Return visit. Read the place description above.