stlgph wrote:Mostly rural? Have you been along the Connecticut shoreline?
East Haven, Branford, Guilford, Madison, Clinton, Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Waterford, Niantic, New London, Mystic, Groton, then you can go up north into the country, where a lot of people reside in all kinds of hamlets and then there's the reach up into Norwich, Middletown, Meriden, Wallingford, Hamden, etc.
95 New Haven to Providence generally isn't as much of a nightmare as it is from NY state up to New Haven. If you offer a good enough deal, people will have no problem(s) driving down from the Providence or Hartford areas.
It's not Quiet Corner or Litchfield County rural, but it's still nowhere near as densely populated as Fairfield County or Hartford and its suburbs. Once you get east of Branford, the population density drops off pretty quickly; that's pretty much why the drive on I-95 between New Haven and Providence isn't as bad as it is from New Haven west.
Either way, the four counties of Eastern CT (Windham, Tolland, New London, Middlesex) combined have about 150,000 fewer inhabitants than New Haven County alone -- so the catchment will be far more about New Haven, Fairfield, and Hartford Counties (just under 2.7 million people) than it is about the shore east of New Haven or Rhode Island.