Boston

A lot of the time I spent in Boston was just relaxing and hanging out with my family, but here are my thoughts on the attractions we visited while I was there.

Plymouth
Plymouth is about an hour south of Boston and is where the original pilgrims landed.

Plimoth Plantation

Plimoth Plantation is a living history museum in Plymouth. The main attractions are the English Village, a recreation of the settlement in 1627, and the Wampanoag Homesite, a recreation of a Native American settlement from the same time period. There is also a Craft Centre where you can watch objects being made, as well as some shops and a café.

Most of the people in the English Village were roleplaying as people from the time period and they seemed to mostly ignore visitors unless you asked them questions. Since no-one in our group was outgoing enough to ask many questions, I didn't get much out of the English Village apart from seeing the buildings. I preferred the Wampanoag Homesite and Craft Centre, where the people were more proactive about explaining what they were doing.

My favourite part was seeing a mishoon (canoe) being made in the Wampanoag Homesite entirely by burning. I also enjoyed seeing beeswax candles being made in the Craft Centre. While at the Wampanoag Homesite we also saw a native bird of prey (not sure if it was an eagle or a hawk) eating a mouse which was quite exciting.

The café offered regular modern food but also period food, both English and Native American. We tried a sampler plate of each of English and Native American food and I preferred the Native American one.

Mayflower II

The Mayflower II is a replica of the original Mayflower that brought the pilgrims to America. It was sailed from England to America in 1957 but is now berthed in Plymouth. Like the English Village at the Plimoth Plantation, there are roleplayers on board, but they seemed to be more proactive about talking about life on the boat than the people in the English Village, and some of them were also quite funny. Overall this was really interesting.

It was also a short walk from the Mayflower II to Plymouth Rock, which is according to legend the rock that the pilgrims first stepped on when they arrived. The only problem with visiting the Mayflower II was that there was some kind of local festival going on in town on the day we visited so we had to park miles away and walk down to the water.

Salem

Salem had a strange mix of exhibits about the Salem witch trials which went to great lengths to point out that no-one involved was actually a witch, and stalls run by people who claimed to actually be witches. Like Plymouth, there was a festival going on when we visited (must have been the season) but this one was out of the main town area and didn't seem to have any effect on our visit.

Witch House

This house was where one of the judges in the witch trials lived. All the signs on the outside of the house said that it was open, but the doors all seemed to be locked, so we didn't actually get to go inside. But it was still a nice example of a period house.

Salem Museum

We mainly visited this museum to fill in time before the tour started at the Witch History Museum. It was a very small museum and mostly consisted of signs with information about the history of Salem. We probably could have read all of the same information on the internet for free, but since we hadn't done much research beforehand it provided some nice background for our visit to the Witch History Museum.

Witch History Museum

There are several witch museums in Salem and all of them got mixed reviews on the internet. We picked this one largely because the location was convenient. At all of the museums the tours started on the half hour, but you needed to get there a bit before the half hour to have time to buy a ticket. The museum consisted of a series of dioramas, in some cases with some lacklustre animatronics, which a guide took us through. For the most part the dioramas were fairly cheesy, but our guide was excellent and overall we found it very informative. I suspect that having a good experience in any of the witch museums probably relies on having a good guide.

MIT

It was a little strange to walk around a university campus and have to cross busy roads. There was some interesting architecture, particularly the Stata Center.

MIT Museum

This was definitely the highlight of our visit to MIT. The museum boasts a huge collection of holograms, but there were only a handful on display and only one was recent and therefore impressive. The kinetic art by Arthur Ganson was really good, and we were very impressed by the Eight Einsteins hybrid images. We had lots of fun with the hands on exhibits as well.

Museum of Science

We mainly came here to see the Science Behind Pixar exhibit, which was excellent. There were lots of hands on exhibits demonstrating many aspects of computer animation. The exhibit required a timed ticket, but we bought a ticket when we arrived and could have chosen any time we liked (including one less than 10 minutes away).

The ticket to the Pixar exhibit also included admission to the regular exhibits. There was a strange mix of traditional museum exhibits and hands-on activities. I think we were a bit museumed out by the time we finished seeing the Pixar exhibit and didn't get as much out of the rest of museum as we would have if we had come back another day (the ticket to the general exhibits could have been used any time within 6 months but because I had limited time in Boston we did it all in one day).