A shaded gravel pad at Old Mystic, with a fire pit beside the rig and dinner coming off the grill, is a place nobody packs up from in the morning. Over at Mystic Seaport Museum, the Charles W. Morgan lies at the wharf, its masts and tarred rigging standing over a historic village and a shipyard. Built in 1841, it is the oldest commercial ship still afloat. Mystic Aquarium, with its beluga whales, sea lions, and penguins, takes the other half of the day.
Sun Outdoors Mystic, the Old Mystic resort that used to be Seaport RV Resort, keeps the Seaport and the aquarium close enough that the rig can stay on its pad all week while the days fill up around it. It's an all-ages park that allows pets, so the dog comes along, and it makes an easy first night coming in off I-95. When the harbor has had its week, the other Connecticut base is in the opposite corner of the state, up in the Litchfield Hills.
Sun Outdoors Mystic, the pad for the east-end week
Book the pad before the rig. The resort's RV sites are water and electric at 30 or 50 amp, in both pull-through and back-in layouts, and its page gives no length limit, so confirm your rig's length with the resort when you reserve. A pull-through spares the driver from backing a 30-foot motorhome into a site after the I-95 run, and a 50-amp pad gives the air more headroom on a muggy July night.
The shore west of Mystic is its own RV trip. The private hookup parks at Clinton and Madison, and a beach night at Rocky Neck State Park in East Lyme with Long Island Sound out front, are written up on the New Haven RV page.
The Litchfield Hills from Lone Oak at East Canaan
Up in the northwest corner, the Litchfield Hills trade the harbor for the foothills of Canaan Mountain, and Lone Oak Campsites in East Canaan sits right at their base. It's a family campground on a big scale, with more than 400 sites, two pools and a lounge, so the afternoons between drives through the hills have somewhere to land.
For the rig, the campground lists full-hookup RV sites at 30 or 50 amp and sewer at the site plus a dump station on the grounds, which makes a week under the mountain a week without a tank run. Mystic and the hills sit at opposite ends of Connecticut, so they pair best as two halves of a long trip or as two separate ones.
Two people who would rather move through the hills each night than base under them will find a smaller vehicle easier on the back roads, and the Connecticut campervan page outlines that route.