States & Provinces visited on this segment: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut
Dates: Monday, July 30 to Friday, August 3
Miles driven: 669 (8380 total to date)
Summary: We left our campground in Chichester Monday morning and headed south into Massachusetts. After lunch we stopped at Plimoth Plantation outside of Plymouth Massachusetts and spent the afternoon touring this recreation of the early 17th century pilgrim settlement. Plimoth Plantation is a recreation of what the settlement looked like in 1627, 7 years after the landing of the Mayflower. The settlement has been built using the same construction techniques that the pilgrims used, and the staff wears period clothing and plays the part of some of the original settlers. They move about the settlement doing typical tasks from the time (tending the gardens, cooking, building and repairing structures, etc. You can interact with them, and ask them questions about the life in the colony, its history, religion, etc. However, they don’t know anything past the year 1627, so if you ask them something they about shouldn’t know they give you a puzzled look and tell you they don’t know what you are talking about. A couple of them asked us where we were from, and we said Oregon. They said they didn’t know where that was. After asking us some other questions, and us telling them it was far to the west, etc., one asked if Oregon was near the Isle of California. We said yes. Not too much different than today when many people aren’t sure where Oregon is but if you tell them it is north of California then they know where it is. We all enjoyed Plimoth Plantation. We then found a campground where we spent the next three nights.
On Tuesday we went back into Plymouth and toured the Mayflower II. The Mayflower II is a recreation of the original Mayflower and was launched in 1957 in England and sailed over to America. On board we learned more about the conditions that the settlers faced while sailing over to America in 1620. We spent some additional time walking around Plymouth and then headed SE to Cape Cod for the rest of the day. On Cape Cod we went to a couple of light houses, when to the visitor center for the National Seashore, and the kids went swimming out near the end of the Cape.
On Wednesday we spent the day in Boston. We drove into Quincy and took the T (subway) into town. Our first stop was in Cambridge, and we went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I showed Karen and the kids where I lived while in graduate school plus some of the other sites on campus. We then got back on the T and headed into back into central Boston, getting off next to Boston Common. We spent some time enjoying Boston Common and the Public Gardens. The kids went on the swan boats, and they splashed around in frog pond to cool off as it was very hot that day. We spent the rest of the day walking the Freedom Trail. The Freedom Trail is a marked walking path through the streets of Boston that takes you to 20+ old historic sites – the Old State House, Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s House, the Old North Church, … We ate dinner at Quincy Marketplace and then took the T out of town and drove back to our campsite near Plymouth. We were tired after walking several miles in the heat around town.
On Thursday we said goodbye to Massachusetts temporarily and drove west to Rhode Island. We stopped in Newport for lunch and went on a tour of The Breakers, a 70 room “summer cottage” built by Cornelius Vanderbilt II in 1895. It is amazing how much money the rich had back then and how they spent it - basically to impress and out do their friends. We left RI and headed down to Stonington Connecticut to visit a friend of Karen’s. After checking in at the campground we drove into Stonington and met Karen’s friend Ann at a club on the waterfront that she belongs to. The kids played at the swimming beach at the club while Karen and Ann visited and we sipped our margaritas. When the sun went down the kids changed clothes and we had dinner. Ann had prepared a great picnic feast to have down at the waterfront. She grilled hamburgers for the kids and we had lobster, a great salad, bread, and other goodies. Ann gets an A+ for the delicious food as well as the “presentation”. She had a floral arrangement for the table, and we ate our dinner by candlelight. We were spoiled! After dinner the kids made smores, and then ran around with sparklers that Ann had brought. We stayed until the club shut down.
On Friday we met Ann for breakfast and got a tour of her art gallery in Stonington before we said goodbye and headed out of town. We drove north through Connecticut and back into Massachusetts. We spent the afternoon at Old Sturbridge Village. Old Sturbridge Village is a recreation of a New England rural village from the early 1800s. They have moved more than 40 buildings in from around New England and costumed staff performs tasks representative of the lives of early New Englanders. We enjoyed seeing demonstrations of many tasks from that time period – cheese making, dying yarn, making pottery, … After leaving Sturbridge we drove west and found a campground close to Springfield.
Other notes: I had almost forgotten about all of the police officers in Massachusetts, but it
only took a day or so of being back in the state for me to remember how many police there are in the state. I don’t exaggerate when I say that in three days in Massachusetts we have seen easily twice as many police than on the entire rest of our trip. Half of the population must be employed in law enforcement. They are everywhere – driving down the roads, beside the road with someone pulled over for speeding, hiding alongside the road waiting to catch someone speeding, patrolling the city streets on foot, writing parking tickets, and of course (only in Massachusetts?) at all road construction sites. Massachusetts had a law (and it seems to still be in effect) that for all road construction sites there needs to be a police office present when any work is being done. Even though they don’t seem to do anything, there they are beside the road (asleep?) in their police cars at all road construction sites even if the work being done is 100 feet off the existing road and there is no change to the normal traffic flow. Not sure why there is such an extreme police presence, but it was something that stuck me as being very different when I moved there to attend MIT in 1988, and again on this trip it seemed very different than everywhere else we had been in the US and Canada. In case you are wondering we didn’t get stopped by any of the police.
Next up: Philadelphia
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