Our year end Friday School trip this year was to Plimoth Plantation and the Mayflower II. I'm going to break this trip up into three blog posts; Intro and Wampanoag homesite, English village, and Mayflower II. We had an overnight stay at a hotel with a pool and decent weather. Doesn't that make every trip more fun? We arrived May 8, got checked in and visited with friends at a pizza party. Then we headed for the pool. The boys watched some Thomas and Friends in the hotel room before dozing off. The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and checked out.
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| Waiting to go in. |
(I love looking back on our lives and seeing the littles when they were so much little-er.)
Our first stop was the Henry Hornblower II Visitor Center where we watched a film in the Plimoth cinema about what we would be seeing and hearing at the Wampanoag homesite and English village. We learned that the spelling of Plimoth Plantation that is used came about because anyone who could write spelled however they wanted and that was how the Governor of Plimoth, William Bradford, spelled Plymouth.
I was a bit disappointed at some of the "education" we received at the Wampanoag homesite. There, we were told the reason small pox wiped out so many was that the native people had no experience with contagious illnesses and did not quarantine the ill members of the group. This woman claimed the only "sickness" was infection from injury. When pressed further, she did admit they had the common cold. In trying to keep this page family friendly, I will just say that they gave the English a rather nasty illness in return, which the settlers took back to England.
I was really interested in the three sisters method of planting. This involves making a pile of loose dirt and planting several pieces of corn in the top (thinning to three or four stalks). When the corn is hand high, beans are planted around the sides of the mound of dirt and use the corn stalks as support. I'm not as clear about the timing of the squash (or melons, pumpkins, etc.), which is planted at the base, but that is the third "sister" in the mound.
At the garden area, we were also told there were no weeds before the English arrived and no rats and flies. Really? Those dirty, rotten English scoundrels brought all kinds of vermin and weeds to the new world and destroyed the idyllic paradise the native peoples enjoyed. Bummer. A little internet research right in the parking lot before we headed to the Mayflower II revealed that there were indeed weeds and rats here.
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