Road Trip 2011: Day 7 – heading south

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Our original plan called for us to spend Friday in Boston, maybe taking a harbor cruise or going to some of the places we didn’t get to see yesterday. As we talked about it back in the hotel last night, however, we realized we had seen all we wanted to see and maybe it made sense to start heading south to make tomorrow’s drive (to Richmond, VA) a little easier. So this morning, as we ate breakfast in the hotel room, we made last minute reservations at a hotel outside of Norwich, CT and decided that’s where we would stop tonight.

The original plan did call for us to quickly drive up to Maine, however, so we could say we hit all of the New England states on our vacation. We re-packed the Highlander, checked out of our Boston hotel, and headed north for the last time on this trip. We crossed the border into Maine just before 11:30am and stopped in the Kittery area to do a little shopping. Down the road we found the When Pigs Fly bakery and after tasting some of their delicious breads at the sample bar walked out with a few loaves to snack on in the car.

Continuing with the original plan (just a day early) we headed back south towards Boston to go over to Plymouth before continuing on to Connecticut. We were back in the Boston area around 2pm and that’s when we encountered our first major traffic jam of the trip: heading south of Boston towards Cape Cod on the Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. Yeah, there was just a little traffic! We used the GPS to try and get around on some back roads and finally made it back onto route 3 to Plymouth. The traffic added about 30 minutes to the trip, but by 3:30pm we were walking along the shores of Plymouth Bay and looking at Plymouth Rock in the Pilgrim Memorial State Park.

Having had a little time to stretch our legs, we got back in the car and drove west back to I-495, marveling at the traffic on the other side of the road. How do all of those people fit in Cape Cod? 😉 Shortly after connecting onto I-295 we stopped in Attleboro to pick up a few groceries. We made sandwiches in the car using our bread from Kittery and continued southwest, through Rhode Island and into Connecticut. We arrived at our hotel in Norwich around 7pm. My daughter swam in the hotel pool while we did our last laundry load of the trip.

It was probably a good idea to start heading a home a day early. Our drive tomorrow to Richmond will be a lot easier to handle (and shorter), although we may need to deal with the New York City traffic.

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