So, I finally got all the photos uploaded from our vacation in October. I decided to divide it into different slideshows for the different places we went (instead of having one really long slideshow to sit through). We had a really fun trip. And the drive was nothing compared to our long trip out here when we moved from Utah.
First we went to Hamden, Connecticut, where Michael’s cousins, Dan and Rachel Soderberg and their son, Thomas, live. It was really fun to see them (I’ve always thought Rachel was the nicest person!), and it was pretty brave of them to invite our whole family to stay overnight at their 2 bedroom apartment. We enjoyed some good food, had fun talking, the kids played together, we went to church with them, and we went walking in a forest to see the Fall leaves before we headed off to our next destination. Thanks for letting us stay with you, Dan and Rachel!
Next we headed to Rhode Island, and stayed in a hotel a little north of Providence. In the morning we all enjoyed swimming in the hotel pool after breakfast. Then we went to Newport and ate lunch near an old fort that has been there for years. We took pictures of each of the boys touching the water so they could each say they’ve touched the Atlantic Ocean. (That makes 2 oceans for each boy except Courtland, who still needs to take a swim in the Pacific). Then while the boys napped in the car, Michael and I drove around Newport and looked at the cool old mansions by the water. While we were there, we got a phone call from my mom, and she offered to cover the cost of tickets to get into Plymouth Plantation as a belated birthday gift for Michael, which we were excited to take her up on. We found our way to Plymouth, Massachusetts (and since we hadn’t planned to go there originally we didn’t have any Google Maps printed out for the area and our atlas didn’t show details for the small roads on the way there, so we were pleasantly surprised when we just guessed on which small residential roads to take on our way to Plymouth and we ended up right where we needed to be). We found a place to stay and got the kids fed before going out to see the sights the next morning. I remembered that I thought we had some ancestors who were pilgrims in Plymouth, and so I ended up staying up quite late that night in the hotel room looking at my genealogy file on our laptop and trying to figure out which of the ancestors may have been Mayflower pilgrims by looking at the dates and locations where they were born, married, or died. I actually found quite a few more couples who are my direct ancestors through the Chidester line who were either on the Mayflower or on other ships that came to Plymouth in subsequent years.
So, we started out the next morning (after a very disappointing “continental breakfast” at the hotel that consisted of a tray of cookies, several different types of coffee [which we don’t drink], and some bananas, [but no plates, tables, or chairs except for the love seats in the hotel lobby] – oh well), and we headed to the visitor’s center where Michael found out about the different historical sites in Plymouth. We made a quick stop at a genealogical society for Mayflower descendants, where I was briefly told a little about where there was a cemetery where the pilgrims were buried (although their headstones were made out of wood and no longer exist in the cemetery today), and about a statue that lists all of the male Mayflower pilgrims and their children (which happens to be the tallest granite statue). We headed to Plymouth Plantation, where we enjoyed going inside the Native American buildings and the boys got to ask questions about the things inside. Then we walked to the pilgrim settlement, where there were people dressed in period clothing who only spoke in Old English and didn’t talk about things that were not used in pilgrim times. At one point one of the women was making bread and she asked the boys if they liked bread. Kolby told her that they ate sandwiches, and she acted confused and asked if he ate sand (I guess they didn’t have sandwiches back then, or at least they didn’t call them that). I thought it was pretty cool – Plymouth was my favorite site of the trip. We wished it would have been better weather that day – at one point we had to duck into one of the pilgrim houses and wait for quite a while just because the rain was coming down so hard. We stopped at the shop where they make some of the things at the pilgrim village, and the boys were so excited to see a man making pottery. They asked so many questions, and to his credit the man answered each and every one of their questions (even when Camden started asking what the tables and chairs were for), although I could tell the man seemed a little worn out with all of the questions. We probably stood there for half an hour while the boys fired questions at him and watched him make a pitcher out of clay. After lunch we headed to the Mayflower II, a full-size, functioning replica of the original Mayflower ship. On our way there we stopped and snapped a quick photo of Plymouth Rock (which isn’t too exciting – just a big rock on the beach with a date carved into it). We went inside the ship and there were some people there dressed and acting like pilgrims or sailors, and some people who were dressed in modern clothes and answered questions about the history and things about the ship itself. If I remember right, they said there were about 130 people on the ship, about 30 of those children, and this was not a large ship by any means. And they said that the pilgrims, at least the women and children, would have stayed under the deck for almost the entire trip. We also learned at the settlement that they lived on the ship for a few months after arriving until their houses were built. Wow, glad I don’t have to do that. After we left the ship we stopped briefly at Burial Hill, where some of my pilgrim ancestors were buried, and then went to that statue before heading to find a hotel between Plymouth and Boston. One thing that I was wondering while we were there, was why the Pilgrims were so important – because they weren’t the first group to come to America. But I guess the reasons that they were different from the other earlier groups was that they were the first group who brought families to America, and they were the first to come for reasons other than monetary gain.
We headed to Boston the next day, dreading the terrible traffic that we had heard about from everyone we’d told we were going to drive into Boston, but we never ran into any bad traffic, so I guess we must have been lucky. Our first stop was the Boston temple, where we got out and walked around and let the boys each touch the temple walls (since Michael had recently read a talk by President Monson saying that we should let children touch the temple to feel it’s importance in their lives). Then we drove into the city, found parking, and walked out on Boston Common, a park in the middle of the city. We started walking on the “Freedom Trail,” a walk through the city that passes by many sites of historical importance. What was fun for the boys is that there is an actual line on the sidewalk for them to follow the entire way – parts of it were made out of brick, and others just painted in red, but they enjoyed walking on the line the whole way. We walked past lots of sights, including a statue of Paul Revere and the church where he lit the lanterns. After walking a couple of miles with the boys we headed back, all of us with sore feet, and ended up back at Boston Common where we let the boys play on the playground. We also passed a statue on the way back to the park of Fire Fighters, and we let the boys go up by it and took their picture because Kolby (and sometimes Eli and Camden) wants to be a fire fighter when he grows up. After playing at the playground a little, we walked across the park to the pond and found the statues of the mother duck and ducklings from the children’s book, “Make Way for Ducklings,” which took place in Boston and which was one of my favorite books as a little girl. The boys had fun climbing and playing on the ducks, and Kolby kept asking me to name each of the ducklings over and over. Michael said that Boston was his favorite site of the trip.
After leaving Boston we headed through New Hampshire, where the Fall leaves were beautiful. Actually, they were wonderful in Massachusetts too. They were definitely more colorful in those states than in New York state at that time, and then we got to enjoy all the colors at their brightest here at home a couple of weeks after our trip. When we stopped for dinner in New Lebanon, New Hampshire, I saw this red tree growing next to a pond and had to jump out of the car and get some pictures. We found a hotel for the night, and then the next morning we headed out towards Sharon, Vermont.
When we got to Sharon we asked around town where the birthplace of Joseph Smith Jr., the first prophet for our church in these days, and we were directed to a place outside of town a few miles. Although we knew beforehand by looking online that there would be a monument there, we were pleasantly surprised to find not only a monument, but also a visitor’s center and marked trails that lead to the foundations of the Mack homes, one of which was the home that Joseph was born in. There was also an old stone wall from the Mack family farm, a period stone bridge over a small creek, and the original stone doorstep of the house. It was pretty cool to be able to walk through the leaves down past those sites, and then enjoy watching the Joseph Smith movie in the visitor’s center as long as the boys would allow us to before we headed out and ate lunch (in the car, since it was really quite cold out that day). We then drove home, and we saw some snow on a ski hill in Vermont before coming back into New York.
This was a nice trip – the first time we’ve ever planned a trip where we didn’t make lots of plans and reservations beforehand and plan activities for every minute of the trip. We just decided on the places that we wanted to go, printed out a few maps for how to get to each place, and then we went. We left enough time to spend as much or as little time as we wanted at each place, with a few days to spare at the end of the trip so we could recover from the vacation before starting back into work, school, and normal life. Overall it turned out to be a good trip, although I was telling Michael that next time I think we should try just going one place for the whole trip (less driving) – we won’t be able to afford another trip for a while now, but I’d eventually like to get to New York City and Washington D.C., so those would both be great places to spend a little more time in.
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