Before saying goodbye to Providence, we handled the least glamorous task of any family trip: draining Ariela of a truly heroic quantity of boogers, since she’d been fighting a nasty cold for most of the journey.

Once that unpleasant business was done, we drove around town one more time to catch the sights we hadn’t gotten to yet. Eitan made a quick stop to admire the stunning Rhode Island State House and grab a few photos of its shining dome.

We drove past the Roger Williams National Memorial visitor center, though we didn’t have time to actually go in. Roger Williams, for the record, was the guy who founded Rhode Island itself back in 1636 after being banished from Massachusetts for his own radical ideas about religious freedom, so there’s a nice bit of foreshadowing for a trip that was about to get very heavy on colonial history.

About an hour later, we rolled into Plymouth, Massachusetts. Eitan insists on pronouncing this town “play-mouth,” and he spent the entire visit confidently informing everyone else that they were the ones saying it wrong. For the record, nearly everyone else in America says “PLIH-muth.” Eitan remains unconvinced.

Seals, Salsa, and a Genuinely Great IPA

We started wandering the town and stopped for lunch at a surprisingly good Mexican restaurant downtown. Pretty impressive for a New England take on Mexican food, and the beer I ordered there might be a top-three IPA of my entire life, from a brewery called Maine Beer Company.

Plymouth has a quirky little art scene we weren’t expecting: unique seal sculptures scattered all over downtown, each one painted or decorated with a completely different theme. We spotted one styled after Neil Young, another dressed up as a banker, one covered entirely in mosaic tile. Ariela turned this into a full-blown mission, insisting on a photo with every single seal we passed. We indulged her completely, because when a five-year-old commits to a scavenger hunt with this much enthusiasm, you do not get in her way.

The Mayflower II: A Ship Built to Say Thank You

Our main stop of the day was the Mayflower II, a full-scale, historically accurate reproduction of the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the Atlantic in 1620. Ariela, already a seasoned veteran of old sailing ships from our earlier stops in Boston and Mystic, ran around the deck like she owned the place.

Here’s the story behind this particular ship, and it’s a genuinely lovely one. This isn’t the original Mayflower, obviously, that ship no longer exists, and there isn’t even a surviving image of what it actually looked like. This replica was built in England in 1955 and 1956 as a gift from the British to the Americans, a symbolic thank-you for the alliance between the two countries during World War II. In 1957, a crew actually sailed it across the Atlantic the old-fashioned way, arriving in America to a full ticker-tape parade in New York City. It underwent a major restoration between 2012 and 2020 and returned to Plymouth just in time for the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ original landing.

Onboard, we learned how the pilgrims actually slept packed together below deck, how they cooked, and just how brutal and cramped the two-month crossing really was. And here’s a detail that thrilled Ariela more than any historical fact could: the ship arrived at its final destination on November 11th, which happens to be her exact birthday. She was absolutely delighted by this coincidence and brought it up roughly a dozen more times before the day was over.

Plymouth Rock: The Most Disappointing Landmark in America, and Why That’s Kind of the Point

Just a few feet away sits the famous Plymouth Rock, frequently and fairly ranked as one of the single most underwhelming tourist attractions in the entire country. It is, quite literally, a rock. A rock behind a small fence, in a little grotto, that most visitors size up in about four seconds before saying some version of “that’s it?”

Here’s the twist that makes it worth knowing before you visit, though: nobody actually confirmed this specific rock was the Pilgrims’ landing spot until 1741, a full 121 years after they arrived, when a 94-year-old church elder named Thomas Faunce claimed his father had told him it was the one. There’s no contemporary Pilgrim writing that mentions a rock at all. The stone has also been unceremoniously abused over the centuries: colonists cracked it in half by accident while trying to move it in 1774, it broke again after falling off a cart in 1834, and what you see today is only an estimated one-third to one-half of its original size, the rest chipped away over generations by souvenir hunters and monument builders.

Unfortunately for us, Ariela saw all the coins in the pit but we didnt have one for her to make a wish with, so we went to a store to get some change before coming back to hear he usual wish: “unicorns”

So yes, it’s just a rock. But the enduring appeal isn’t really about the rock itself, it’s about what an entire nation decided to project onto it: the idea of a beginning, a foothold, a first step onto a new continent. Symbolism carries a lot of weight when the actual object is this underwhelming. Still, it’s a rock.

A Very Serious Grinding Mill

We kept wandering, spotting more seal sculptures and admiring the town’s architecture, and even stumbled onto a fun interactive art installation built entirely around high-fiving strangers. Ten out of ten, would high-five again.

Next we visited Plymouth Grist Mill, home to genuinely excellent hands-on exhibits explaining, in very kid-friendly terms, how old mechanical systems actually worked. After a short introductory talk on how grinding mills operate, they set us loose to explore everything ourselves.

The guide there was fantastic, patiently walking us through every mechanism while Ariela got to try each one hands-on: a manual water pump designed to lift water higher, a hand-cranked grinder, and an old strategy game called Three Men’s Morris, which Ariela naturally declared she’d won, obviously. They even had a jar of genuinely corny jokes on offer, which was Eitan’s personal favorite exhibit of the entire day.

A Flatbread Casualty and an Underrated Giant

Back in downtown, we grabbed a beer and a flatbread that turned out to be, without exaggeration, one of the worst flatbreads we’ve ever eaten on this entire trip. You win some, you lose some.

Our final stop of the day was one of the most surprisingly under-visited monuments we’ve encountered anywhere: the National Monument to the Forefathers. This thing is massive, genuinely impressive, and packed with symbolism, standing 81 feet tall and believed to be the largest solid granite monument in the entire world, carved from granite quarried in Maine and completed in 1889.

Birds decided the head of the statue was a great place for a nest. Pretty funny!

At its center stands a 36-foot figure representing Faith, pointing skyward while holding a Bible, surrounded by four smaller seated figures representing Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. For something this monumental, both figuratively and literally, it’s baffling how few tourists actually make the stop. While we admired it, Ariela used the moment to sprint around on the surrounding lawn, because apparently there is some kind of magnetic force between small children and open grass that scientists have yet to fully explain.

On our way back to the hotel we made the very sophisticated stops of Target for snacks and McDonald’s for ice cream, and then called it a night.

Living History at Patuxet

The next morning, after breakfast and packing up, we headed to our final stop of the entire trip: Plymouth’s living history village, known as Patuxet, where costumed interpreters recreate daily Pilgrim and Wampanoag life Disneyland-style, fully in character and ready to answer questions as if they were actually living in the 1620s.

They didn’t shy away from the hard parts of the story either. We learned that the Pilgrims’ first winter in America was brutal almost beyond comprehension: of the roughly 102 people who crossed on the Mayflower, more than half died within the first few months from disease, malnutrition, and exposure to a winter they were completely unprepared for. Those who survived only made it because of help from the Wampanoag people, most famously Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn and where to fish and hunt. That eventual successful harvest is what led to the shared celebratory feast in the fall of 1621, the event now remembered as the first Thanksgiving.

The village itself is split into two very different areas: an early Wampanoag settlement and a separate Pilgrim colonial village. We spent time in a massive traditional hut learning about hunting, community structure, and daily life before European contact. The Pilgrim side, styled with more familiar early English architecture, was equally engaging, with a different costumed interpreter posted at each house demonstrating a specific skill, cooking in one, knitting in another. Ariela was completely captivated by this part.

Unfortunately, while we were on the far side of the village, a massive downpour rolled in with zero warning. We ducked into one of the huts to wait it out, but with our travel schedule tightening, we eventually had to make a run for the car anyway, getting thoroughly soaked in the process.

Homeward Bound

We drove back to Boston, where Eitan dropped Sarah and Ariela off at the airport before heading into downtown to return the rental car. Returning it downtown instead of at the airport saved us a solid $300, so the extra hassle was well worth it, even after Eitan spent a full hour sitting in Boston traffic just to make it happen. He rejoined the family just in time for a mercifully uneventful flight home.

And that’s a wrap on our New England adventure. An absolutely fantastic region for a family road trip with kids, full of history at every single turn, and we’d happily do the whole thing again.

Bonus Pic of the Day: The Anti-Shuffle Zone

We’ve all heard the classic parking rule about not being allowed to feed the meter again once your time runs out, and having to move your car to a new spot if you want to stay longer. What we had never actually seen, in all our years of driving and parking in various cities, was an official posted sign for it. Somewhere in Providence, there stands a sign explicitly warning drivers about an “Anti-Shuffle Zone.” There’s a first time for everything.