12 Best Sights in New Haven, Mystic, and the Coast, Connecticut

Central to Old Lyme's artistic reputation is this grand late-Georgian-style mansion, which served as a boardinghouse for members of the Lyme Art Colony in the first decades of the 20th century. When artists such as Willard Metcalf, Clark Voorhees, Childe Hassam, and Henry Ward Ranger flocked to the area to paint its varied landscape, Miss Florence Griswold offered both housing and artistic encouragement. The house has been restored to its 1910 appearance, when the colony was in full flower (clues to the house's layout and décor were gleaned from members' paintings). The museum's 10,000-square-foot Krieble Gallery, on the riverfront, hosts changing exhibitions of American art. Café Flo, on-site, serves lunch on the veranda or have a picnic on the lawn.

The largest of the state's public beach parks, Hammonasset Beach State Park has 2 miles of white-sand beach, a top-notch nature center, excellent birding, and a hugely popular campground with more than 550 open sites. Amenities: food and drink; lifeguards; parking (fee); showers; toilets. Best for: swimming; walking.

Oddly enough, you'll find the world's largest indoor adventure ropes course within Jordan's Furniture Store. The 60-foot-high courses have more than 100 activities, like walking across zigzag swinging beams rope ladders, bridges, moving planks, a 50-foot free-fall jump, four 200-foot-long ziplines, and more. At Little IT, toddlers and little kids can zip along, too.

Housed in a large complex 1 mile from Foxwoods, this museum brings to life in exquisite detail the history and culture of the Northeastern Woodland tribes in general and the Mashantucket Pequots in particular. Highlights include views of an 18,000-year-old glacial crevasse, a caribou hunt from 11,000 years ago, and a 17th-century fort. Perhaps most remarkable is a sprawling "immersion environment": a 16th-century village with more than 50 life-size figures and real smells and sounds. Audio devices provide detailed information about the sights. A full-service restaurant offers both Native and traditional American cuisine. A 185-foot stone-and-glass tower provides sweeping views of the surrounding countryside.

The famous Arctic Coast exhibit—which holds 750,000 gallons of water, measures 165 feet at its longest point by 85 feet at its widest point, and ranges from just inches to 16½ feet deep—is just a small part of this revered establishment and home to three graceful beluga whales and several species of seals and sea lions. You can also see African penguins, fascinating sea horses, Pacific octopuses, and sand tiger sharks. Don't miss feeding time at the Ray Touch Pool, where rays suction sand eels right out of your hand. The animals here go through 1,000 pounds of herring, capelin, and squid each day—Juno, a male beluga whale, is responsible for consuming 85 pounds of that himself.

Mystic Seaport, the nation's leading maritime museum, encompasses 19 acres stretched along the Mystic River. The indoor and outdoor exhibits include a re-created New England coastal village, a working shipyard, and formal museum buildings with more than 1 million artifacts, including figureheads, models, tools, ship plans, scrimshaw, paintings, photos, and recordings. Along the narrow village streets and in some of the historic buildings, craftspeople demonstrate skills such as open-hearth cooking and weaving, interpreters bring the past to life, musicians sing sea chanteys, and special squads with maritime skills show how to properly set sails on a square-rigged ship. The museum's more than 500 vessels include the Charles W. Morgan, the last remaining wooden whaling ship afloat, and the 1882 training ship Joseph Conrad; you can climb aboard both for a look around or for sail-setting demonstrations and reenactments of whale hunts.

Children under three are admitted free.

Possibly the state's finest beach, the 50-acre park has a broad white-sand beach, an Olympic-size outdoor pool with a triple waterslide, an 18-hole miniature-golf course, an arcade, a half-mile-long boardwalk, kiddie rides, food concessions, a nature trail, and a picnic area. Amenities: food and drink; lifeguards; parking (fee); showers; toilets. Best for: partiers; swimming; walking.

The world's first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus (SSN-571)—and the first submarine to complete a submerged transit of the North Pole (in 1958)—was launched and commissioned in Groton in 1954. The Nautilus spent 25 active years as a showpiece of U.S. technological know-how and is now permanently docked at the Submarine Force Museum, a couple of miles upriver from where the sub was built. Visitors are welcome to climb aboard and explore. The museum, just outside the entrance to Naval Submarine Base New London, is a repository of thousands of artifacts, documents, and photographs detailing the history of the U.S. Submarine Force component of the U.S. Navy, along with educational and interactive exhibits.

The Kate, as the Center is generally known, is an intimate, 250-seat theater in the Old Saybrook Town Hall building on the historic town green. The Kate presents a full calendar of concerts, dance, drama, opera, comedy, films (including some classic Hepburn films), and children's theater. (Some performances are broadcast on PBS TV in the national series, "The Kate.") In addition to the performances and presentations, a small museum displays memorabilia and reminiscences about Katharine Hepburn's life and career. She was a resident of Old Saybrook from 1912 (age five) until her death in 2003.

Featuring the largest collection of British art outside Britain, the center surveys the development of English art, life, and thought from the Elizabethan period to the present. The skylighted galleries, one of architect Louis I. Kahn's final works, contain artwork by John Constable, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, and J. M. W. Turner, to name but a few. You'll also find rare books and paintings documenting English history. Explore on your own or take a free guided tour, offered Thursday and Saturday at 11 am and weekends at 2 pm.

New Haven's manufacturing history dates to the 19th century, but the city owes its fame to merchant Elihu Yale. In 1718, his contributions enabled the Collegiate School, founded in 1701 at Saybrook, to settle in New Haven and change its name to Yale College. In 1887, all of its schools were consolidated into Yale University. This is one of the nation's great institutions of higher learning, and its campus holds some handsome neo-Gothic buildings and noteworthy museums. Student guides conduct hour-long walking tours that include Connecticut Hall in the Old Campus, one of the oldest buildings in the state, which housed a number of illustrious students—including Nathan Hale, Noah Webster, and Eli Whitney. Tours start from the visitor center.

Since its founding in 1832, this art gallery has amassed more than 200,000 works from around the world, dating from ancient Egypt to the present day. Highlights include works by Vincent van Gogh, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, as well as Etruscan and Greek vases, Chinese ceramics and bronzes, early Italian paintings, and a collection of American decorative arts that is considered one of the world's finest. The gallery's landmark main building is also of note: Opened in 1953, it was renowned architect Louis I. Kahn's first major commission and the first modernist building on the neo-Gothic Yale campus.