This morning was a much better one so we headed into Plymouth to check out their rock. Plymouth is a nice little tourist town and it’s very pretty walking across the harbour front. We had a walk around and visited Plymouth Rock, which supposedly the second place that the pilgrims landed when they came to this country. The rock is, well just a rock with a date stamped on it, not the most exciting thing to look at. There were also some statues that had been erected in honour of the pilgrims’ Indian protector, Massasoit, and William Bradford, one of the pilgrims who became governor of the colony. There is also a tomb that marks the place of the pilgrims’ first burial site.
After leaving Tal-y in the car and having a really lovely Indian for lunch, we checked out the Mayflower II which is a replica of the ship that brought the pilgrims across the ocean in 1620. From the outside it looks tiny, especially compared to the ships we have today, but once on board it is actually quite spacious with three levels plus the bilge (which we couldn’t go into). Then I remembered that there were 100+ people on this boat for 66 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so spacious. The lower levels rode really close to the ocean and I can’t imagine it was any fun crossing the Atlantic in this boat. I imagine that it was really smelly by the time they reached the US shore, and that everyone was really glad to get off.
After heading home we checked out the cranberry harvester for a little while; they are still separating the berries from the plants, and there are thousands of them on the surface of the water. Later this evening we took a walk around the park and to Leonard’s Pond which is more like a lake/river since it’s huge and the water is flowing someplace; don’t think ponds flow do they? We tried to get Tal-y out on the little pier to check out the swans but she wasn’t having any of it. She likes her feet on terra firma, and much prefers the squirrels to the birds.

Mike: Nice area, the Mayflower was cool!