Plymouth and Cape Cod

More weekend adventures for the Arnett family. On Saturday we woke up at 6am to head out to Plymouth. The whole day probably wouldn't have happened had Tom not purchased the tickets for our trolley tour the night before. I'm not exactly a morning person so when I have to wake up earlier than usual I protest and battle with any excuse I can possibly come up with. I'm confident I would have been able to come up with something to postpone the trip for another time just so I could sleep an extra hour or two. But I digress.

To start, let's talk about Tom. At BYU, there is a random statue of a Native American at BYU and his name is Chief Massasoit. When we moved to Kansas City, we were driving downtown and spotted the exact same statue. After some research, Tom learned that there are 5 or 6 scattered across the country and he was then determined to get a picture with each one. So, he found an old picture he took with it at BYU for a photo scavenger hunt...

and then he took a picture with the Kansas City fellow...

and then yesterday he was able to add to his collection with the Plymouth statue.

Mission Accomplished.

We also visited Plymouth Rock. For those of you who happen to be as ignorant of historical facts as I am, it turns out that Plymouth Rock is exactly that. A rock. Not a huge boulder plunging out into the coast line. Just a rock. Highly anti-climactic. 

Tom then took Joey on the Mayflower II (a replica they made in the 1950s and sailed from England to Plymouth) while Moses and I waited outside (I'm not big on boats and Moses was a wee bit cranky at the time so we figured we'd save the $10)

It turns out that New England fish and chips is the best way to get your children to smile on a vacation. 

After lunch, we tried to drive over to the Plimouth Plantation but the boys conked out on the way over and we knew that it would just be a disaster if we tried to wake them up so we decided to take advantage of nap time and drove up to Cape Cod for the rest of the day.

We found a canoe rental place on a cute little pond/river and played in the water for an hour or so. Our one main problem was that we hadn't planned for water when we left in the morning so we didn't have swimsuits, swim diapers or towels. We improvised by purchasing new suits for Tom and me (we were due anyway) and just leaving the boys in their regular diapers and some shorts.


We had only packed rompers for Moses so he was stuck with just a diaper.

Joey ended up loving being in the boat and "helping" paddle. 

After our time in the pond, we figured that we'd come all the way out to Cape Cod so we would definitely need to stop by the actual ocean. To access the beach we found we had to go down a ginormous dune. Not so hard going down, REALLY difficult coming back up with two kids that insisted on walking but really couldn't. 

Tom tried to go swimming in the waves but found that it was rather painful with the ginormous rocks that rolled around under the water. This was the first handful he brought me. 

This was the second.

After the beach we headed to get some pizza and then drove home. We got home around 12:30 and were all exhausted. Needless to say, Sunday was a bit of a struggle with 2 overly-tired toddlers trying to make it through church but we made it.