The trip to the South Shore is easiest by car, provided you avoid rush hours on I-93 and Rte. 3. The Red Line will get you only far enough to see the home of John and John Quincy Adams, located in Quincy (pronounced KWIN-zee). The Plymouth/Brockton bus (508-746-0378; www.p-b.com), leaving from the Greyhound and Peter Pan terminals at South Station several times a day, runs to Plymouth (about 1hr; $9 each way) and elsewhere south.
The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock 16 years before Harvard was founded, making this craggy piece of the Atlantic coast the oldest surviving white settlement in New England. Today, the Puritan settlement is heavily commercialized and attracts a large crop of tourists. Pilgrim Hall Museum (508-746-1620; $6) is the oldest museum in America (1824), and features a gallery of artifacts from the area’s first colonists.
Plimoth Plantation (508-746-1622; www.plimoth.org; $21) is a painstakingly-detailed reconstruction of the Pilgrim settlement in Plimoth exactly as it looked in 1627. Upon entering this living history museum, you will watch a well-done 15min slide show, then stroll through the village and be invited into the houses and farms by the character-actor residents. Chat with them for as long as you like, and watch them doing their day-to-day Pilgrim things—cooking innards, repairing the thatched roof, or worrying about the status of the family’s land plot. The Plantation is open daily April-November.
In nearby Plymouth Harbor, a touristy but charming New England waterfront, the Mayflower II (508-746-1622; $8), a replica of the original floats serenely around the corner from Plymouth Rock, the spot where the Pilgrims landed, which now stands under a monument, only one-third of its original size. The Mayflower II is open daily April-November.
