The Book Barn & the Niantic Boardwalk

The Book Barn is the kind of place you describe to another parent and they assume you're exaggerating. It's a used bookstore spread across a farm: the main barn, then a scatter of sheds, greenhouses, and outdoor shelves through gardens, with resident cats asleep on the inventory and goats supervising the whole operation from their pen.

There are hundreds of thousands of books, and the children's sections are deliberately scattered so the kids treat it like a treasure hunt. Ours disappeared into a shed labeled 'Last Page' and came back twenty minutes later with a dinosaur encyclopedia and a plan to negotiate.

It's a bookstore that spills out of a barn into gardens and sheds, staffed by cats, patrolled by goats. The kids think it's a petting zoo that happens to sell books. They're not wrong.

Book budget settled, it's a five-minute drive to the Niantic Bay Boardwalk. It runs about a mile along the water between the Niantic River bridge and Hole-in-the-Wall Beach, wide and flat with the train tracks on one side and Long Island Sound on the other.

That train detail matters more than any guidebook admits: Amtrak's Acela comes through at speed a few times an hour, close enough to feel in your chest. My kids now rank 'the train almost blew my hat off' above the actual ocean. Plan zero minutes for this; it will happen on its own.

Main Street Niantic connects the two stops, and it's a proper small-town strip: ice cream, a bakery, a diner, a toy store. We did books, boardwalk, ice cream, beach stop, and were home for dinner. Nobody asked for a screen once. That's the whole review.