We had a mostly lazy morning, checking out of the hotel around 11:00. Our first stop was Plymouth Beach, a long stretch of sandy beach along Plymouth Bay. We walked the beach for about 25 minutes before rain threatened and we retreated to Sandy’s, which was the lunch spot on our itinerary. The food was average and combined with a $20 parking fee to make an underwhelming start to the day.
We drove a few minutes to Plimouth Plantation, the community’s most well-known attraction. It was much less busy than expected, and while the first few exhibits continued the underwhelming theme of the day, the 17th-century English village made it worth the stop (and expense.) First-person interpreters speak, act, and dress appropriately for the time and stay in character when interacting with guests like us.
We drove back to the waterfront to tour a replica of the famous Mayflower, which we had access to as part of a combo ticket with the plantation. We rounded out our time in Plymouth with some ice cream and then jumped in the van for a two-hour drive to Manchester, Connecticut, for a pizza dinner.
Frank Pepe is a famous Connecticut pizza place that first opened in New Haven in 1925. The pizza is cooked with a thin crust in a coal-fired oven at a temperature of 650 degrees. I should have done better research and tried their famous “tomato pie” but instead ordered a plain cheese pizza for the kids and a meaty pizza for grown-ups. The pizza was as good as I expected it to be, and we were plenty full for the final leg of our drive to New York.
Road construction meant slow Interstate traffic, so Google sent us on a few backroads to get to Goshen, New York, near LEGOLAND, which was our next destination. Poor planning on my part meant dividing up across two hotel rooms at two different hotels, but they were close enough together and we were all able to get a decent night of sleep in advance of a busy day at the theme park.