Day 118 Cape Cod - Mystic Connecticut
Trip Start
May 07, 2008
1
126
205
Trip End
Nov 22, 2008
Mystic,
Connecticut,
United States
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Leaving the RV Park was simple today compared to the labour day exodus of yesterday.
The trip to Plymouth was quick and easy and we arrived at around 9:30am, before the shops were really open.
No big deal, there was plenty of parking and we even found a free park a little out but the walk is good exercise for the Travellers if you consider the amount of miles we do sitting in the Castle.
We walked down to the wharf to pay for a combination ticket, this allowed us to walk onto the Mayfair II (The first did the trip back in 1620 and returned to England but fell off the radar and no records of what happened to it exist today.
This one was built in 1952-1956 and did a replica journey in 1957. The 102 souls that travelled on the original were escaping the hardships of living in Holland; this was a refuge from persecution of their religious beliefs in England, very brave to undertake such a journey. Half of the original settlers were trades people and financed by English merchants the other half made up of the persecuted Religion as mentioned.
The guides on the ship were dressed in period costume and spoke in the language of the time, they also were very knowledgeable of the food and the challenges at the time. It was really interesting listening to them as they gave some funny and interesting perspectives of the world and beliefs in the time period of the 1600's.
We walked down the street to have a look at Plymouth Rock, this is undergoing a "renovation" (yeah we know, how do you renovate a rock? Well they have put some columns around it and it is fenced off with only a glass window to look through at the top of a rock at this stage.
Oh well we saw a small section of the rock!
We headed back to The Castle and drove to the site of the first Grist mill built and driven by a water wheel to grind the corn to flour.
Earnie Practicing with a metal detector
It was the first to be built in the country, a rebuilt on is on the original site, oh! we drew a blank again, closed on Tuesdays.We head out to the Plimoth Plantation, a site that has been built to show how the original native Wampanoag people lived, with dwellings and canoes as well as continuing the arts and preserving the language. A really great experience to sit in the lodges and hear about the way they lived. They have been in the area for around 12,000 years and before the Europeans arrived they numbered up to around 500,000 people, the arrival of the Europeans decimated the natives by way of disease and kidnapping to be sold into slavery, but mainly the disease. They number around 5000 now and hopefully will continue to grow and preserve the values and culture.
The attached English settlement village was a short walk and a step back in time to the 1620's.
An amazing village with guides again acting the time warp period and full of information about the times and how the system was developed.
The animals and plants in the village have been retained or developed from the written history.
It was a great walk down the lanes of time.
We had lunch in the car park, gee the Castle is great to give us the ability to do this simple task, then rolled out and headed for Cape Cod, we had all heard about Cape Cod and of course wanted to have a look.
Well the drive was ok, but we found ourselves on a freeway with no real visual of water or anything much at all.
Karon at Cape Cod beach
So we pulled into the Information centre to get some idea what to look for or where to go.We set off again in the wrong direction, but rectified that as soon as we could and headed along a route to take us towards a beach and some houses.
The houses we observed, were like holiday houses with the odd few of a reasonable size, we found a road to Howe beach and pulled into the car park ($15 per day parking, but no one we could pay) we walked up over the sand dunes to see the water, the wind blowing was not kind and the water was white capped, but at least it was real sand. We talked to a guy with a metal detector, he was gathering coins from the beach, managed to get a ¼ while we were watching. He gave us a bit of a look at the machine, he said he had returned 3 times what he paid for it already, stating he had it paid for in the first day he used it.
We decided the 50 miles to the end of the road would take too much time and we hadn't found a RV park at this stage.
So we decided to program Mandy to the KOA at Connecticut.
This done, off we went, no big deal, we struck some heavy traffic through the city of Providence, along the freeway and it was bumper to bumper. We negotiated our way through without any major hassles and found our present home site.
The KOA in Mystic, the town made famous because of the Julia Roberts movie, Mystic Pizza, our research is telling us the movie only had a couple of scenes shot here and the actual pizza shop was in another town, yet of course a couple of Pizza shops have taken the name, We guess they would do alright.
Tomorrow New York, a RV camp is yet to be decided, as the two we have attempted to make contact with have not returned a call, so tomorrow will be follow up.
Hope you enjoyed the photos and we will get some more up over the next few days.
