A nice morning, the rain is gone for now. A bit chilly though, wore long sleeves but changed to short sleeves by the time we left the campsite. Wish I'd changed into shorts as well.
We made our way north out of the campground and headed toward Plymouth. Even more than Cape Cod, my reason for wanting to visit this area due to my nine Mayflower ancestors. Plimoth Plantation was a major mental debate for me. Cost, plus what to do with Max contributed to my decision to forego the plantation. Maybe another time.
We arrived in Plymouth and soon found a free parking space downtown. I would imagine in a few weeks that would have been a much tougher task. We were almost right next to a statue of William Bradford and visited that first. Then walked down the street to see THE rock. Plymouth Rock. I must say I was duly unimpressed. It's just a rock with "1620" on it. They're not even sure it was actually where the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth. Anyway, to protect this rock they built a huge portico and you stand around it and look down at the rock on the beach below. You aren't even allowed to touch the rock. It's good to think about what it represents, but it wasn't as big of a deal as I thought it would be. Believe it or not, I was so geeked about seeing the rock and being in Plymouth that I didn't even take the GPSr out of the car.
On to our second disappointment. The replica of the Mayflower. It wasn't there. It was in drydock and will be back in June. Doesn't help us now. Oh well. One more reason to someday come back. We walked around the waterfront area for a while, did a little souvenir shopping, then climbed up to a small park where we found a crypt representing those who died during the first year. They were all buried together and corn planted over the graves as the Pilgrims didn't want the Indians to know just how many had died. Several of my ancestors were listed. There were also statues of a Pilgrim Mother and Massasoit during this part of our walk.
We then walked a few more blocks to visit the Jabez Howland house. This is the only surviving house in Plymouth where Pilgrims actually lived - the Pilgrims being my ancestors John & Elizabeth Howland, in their son Jabez's house. Unfortunately, the house wasn't yet open for the season so we had to be content with looking around the outside.
We walked back to the car, and headed toward the Monument to the Forefathers. This was one HUGE statue, dedicated to the memory of the Forefathers. It was bigger than lifesize, probably by two-three times. I think that it is one of the largest statues of stone anywhere. We pulled up just ahead of a tour bus so had to share the monument with many others. No worries, there was plenty of room. This time I did remember my GPS and there was a two-part cache at the monument which required me to gather some information, do some math, then find the final. I had to go into the nearby woods to look for it, and had some trouble but finally found it.
We moved on and decided to stop at Burial Hill. This proved to be the highlight of the day for me. We had read that there were several interesting monuments so decided to just wander a bit. First, we found the monument to Thomas Cushman and his wife, my ancestor Mary Allerton Cushman. Continuing our wandering, I noticed a more modern monument, erected to the memory of the children of John and Elizabeth Howland. Hmmm - there are TWO of my ancestors as I'm descended from the Howlands through two of their daughters. Started looking at the other markers in the immediate area and was rewarded with the marker for John Howland himself. Wow. Just wow.
We walked around a bit more and found William Bradford's monument, and a few other interesting ones. Getting hungry, and seeing others just enjoying the cemetery, we decided to take the chance and ate our sandwich picnic in the cemetery. Chose a respectful place, not on any graves, and cleaned up thoroughly afterwards. While we were eating I realized that there was a virtual cache in the cemetery. I went back to gather the needed information, from a monument to a shipwreck. Unfortunately, it was very hard to read the weathered inscriptions and I had to finally do internet research at home to get the information needed to log the cache.
After this we had seen much of what we had intended to see, of the places we could go with Max anyway. It would have been nice to visit some of the museums but I had had a good day of seeing places where my ancestors had been or were memorialized. Time for a little housekeeping. We went to one of the shopping areas at the edge of town for two reasons: groceries and a coat for Max. We had noticed he was getting cold at night, so decided to look for a coat for him to wear at night. We found a nice fleece coat at Petco on clearance for $4.00. Proved to be a wise choice as it didn't get warmer, just colder, as the trip went on.
We went to a nearby WalMart for some groceries, then headed back to the campground and enjoyed some relaxing time in our chairs, enjoying the lake view. Turned out to be the only time we got our chairs out on the trip.
Since some kind soul had left a large pile of firewood next to our fire ring, I made a fire and prepared foil dinners for our dinner, as well as roasted corn on the cob. The hamburger and potatoes turned out pretty good. I didn't have the corn placed quite as well, and we basically had about an ear and a halfs worth. Oh, fresh strawberries as well. Probably one of the better dinners of the trip. Dishes were fairly easy, I just walked everything down to the dishwashing station and had plenty of hot water with very little effort.
While I did the dishes, Steve decided to take the screen house down as we were leaving the next morning and the screen house was dry. The forecast called for the possibility of rain so didn't want to take any chances. Bed fairly early at 9 pm-ish. I did read from my iPod for a while though. Sunset comes about an hour earlier here, and sunrise as well.
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