The Lights of Connecticut

On clear nights, you can see the lights of Connecticut across Long Island Sound. They're about 20 miles away, and there are more people there than it looks. On the left is probably Bridgeport, a city of 150,000 people.

And here it is again, zoomed and color-rebalanced (i.e., with Photoshop):



The lights of the Connecticut shoreline look nice at night. But up close are traffic-choked Route 95, fancy suburban shopping malls, and old industrial cities all decaying at the core. It's supposed to be the wealthiest state in the United States, but you wouldn't know it from looking at Bridgeport (probably the lights on the left).

Long Island is also full of people, but the North Shore is somehow quiet. The roads are clogged, but they don't go to anywhere in particular, only deeper into the island. In this part of the island, no one seems to make anything, just pizza, fried fish, and ice cream. And the rocky little beach is so narrow that at high tide it disappears entirely. The only thing out here worth speaking of, the only thing that seems permanent, is the water. Oh, and the smell of burning charcoal in the evenings, and the little bugs that crawl over everything.

We'll be here for a few weeks, on a working vacation; expect more pictures occasionally.