My boss and I left the office in New York at approximately 5:30pm on Friday evening and much to our surprise, hit hardly any traffic on our trip north. Foxwoods is literally in the middle of nowhere at the end of a long, curvy, desolate road. But the good news is that we were pulling in to the resort by 8:30pm.
We were being put up in the new wing of the casino, the MGM Grand, where the brand new theater (where our show is taking place) is located. We spotted an Italian restaurant, Alta Strada, right around the corner from the hotel check-in, so quickly dropped everything off in our rooms and then met back downstairs to get some grub. The restaurant was practically empty, yet they still asked us if we just wanted to sit at the bar and eat. Odd. I'm always a big fan of eating on my company's dime, so I rarely hold back. I got a glass of the cabernet sauvignon, a Caesar salad and the ricotta ravioli, which was delicious! The promoter for our show met up with us and chatted for a while, which seemed to drag on forever...I was fading quickly and we couldn't call it a night soon enough. Plus, I needed to wake up early to hit the museum first thing in the morning!
The museum opened at 10am the next morning, so I was up and ready to go after a great night's sleep in my plush king bed (another great perk of work trips...sleeping in a huge bed!) When I asked the VIP concierge the night before where the museum was, he indicated to me I would have to walk all the way to the opposite end of the resort to the third tower, so I allowed about 30 minutes to make the walk. Walking through the casino at this hour was pretty enjoyable...no cigarette smoke, no real noise, and hardly any people. There was almost an eerie calm over the entire place, which is pretty hard to find in a casino! It definitely took a while to make my way all the way to the sign that indicated I had arrived at the museum. So you can imagine my surprise when I found the door locked and could see no one at the front desk. I asked a woman working at a coffee booth across the hallway, and she had no idea why no one was in there. I was very disappointed - after all, this is really what I had been looking forward to this entire trip for!
After sitting and waiting for about 10 minutes with no one showing up, I found the number of the museum and called. They told me I was not at the museum, I was only at the museum's "information center," and that I would have to take a shuttle to the museum because although it was on the Foxwoods "campus," it was not actually connected to the casino. I was so frustrated! This was going to set me back nearly an hour, and I only had a little bit of time to play around with before I had to get into work mode. I ended up having to make my way all the way back to the MGM Tower where I started to catch the shuttle. What a waste of time my little journey was! The shuttle came almost immediately and took approximately 15 minutes to run its route and get me to the museum. When I arrived at the museum at approximately 10:45am, it was pretty obvious why this was not housed within the casino - the building was massive! (Although the photo below doesn't really do it justice).
Admission was $15, but I had a $3.00 off coupon I had grabbed at that completely pointless "information center." At this point, I knew I only had an hour to get through the entire museum, so I focused on the main part I wanted to see - the reconstruction of the traditional Pequot village. The artwork and weapons and tools galleries were necessary evils which I had to fly through to get to the village. I did spend a little time in the clothing gallery...but who hasn't seen Native American clothes, right?
When I walked into the room where the "village" was set up, I was a little bit overwhelmed. First of all, it was incredibly realistic. There were ambient noises of things like birds and bugs and flowing water pumping through the speakers. The large domed ceiling was painted very realistically to look like the sky. There were live trees growing. The pathway through the village was made of dirt. There were sound boxes by each wax figure speaking in the native tongue to give the illusion they were just living their life and I was lucky enough to peek into it. And although I knew the mannequins were all made of wax, they still felt freakishly real. I was also one of only a couple people in the room, which added to the calm that felt settled over the village. The space was also huge and made it feel believable that this is what an actual Pequot village actually looked like, out in the middle of an otherwise-uninhabited Connecticut.
Each wigwam hut had a scene going on outside it - whether it was an elderly woman mashing up food, or a young girl learning how to weave a basket, or two boys playing in the trees above the hut with their bows and arrows aimed at a squirrel in the tree across the way. There were also a couple huts you could actually walk in to and see just how small of a space one family was living in. It was all so incredibly well done, that I just can't say enough positive words about it. I was beyond impressed at how immersed the space made me feel in the Pequots' daily life and culture. Here's a picture of two men paddling through the river that winds down one side of the village, while a woman cleans fish next to her home.
The audio tour that went along with this part of the museum was also very well-executed. It described each scene as I came upon it, and then gave several options to learn more about something that was highlighted in that particular scene (i.e. the Pequot diet, tools used to hunt, etc.) It was really fantastic, and I don't think anyone who goes all the way to Mashantucket, even to gamble, should miss it!
On my way out, I found the room where a 350-500 year-old dugout canoe was being housed. The canoe was rescued from the bottom of a nearby lake, and is obviously a great source of pride for the museum, as two different greeters on my way in both mentioned to me to be sure and see it. It was pretty incredible to think of the natives rowing away in this canoe hunting for fish. I think it would probably submerge in it's current shape:
When I decided I had seen everything I came to see (in just over an hour, no less), I made my way back up to the main floor (the entire museum was built underground), and back out to the driveway to wait on the shuttle. A shuttle drove up after only a couple minutes of waiting, and I was back in the main casino a short time later. The show went well that evening after a long afternoon of working in the venue, I slept like a baby, and woke up eaaaarly the next morning for the drive back to New York with my boss, which only involved a couple pockets of traffic.My trip (Atlantic City to the south and Foxwoods to the north):
"I have discovered that finding a song that mentions Connecticut is impossible." - Nicole Klein
Miles Traveled Today: 140
Total Miles Traveled: 14,115
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