Are you trying to bring history to life for your children? If so, you may be considering a visit to a living history museum. After reading Pilgrim Stories and spending the month of November discussing the First Thanksgiving, we decided to make our own pilgrimage to the Plimoth Patuxet living history museum. Today I’m here to give you all the juicy details – including tips and tricks to make the most of your visit!

PLIMOTH PATUXET FAST FACTS

Address	See below.
Hours of Operation	Daily, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Admission	$5 – $46
Membership (family)	$185/year
Stroller Friendly	Yes
Parking	See below.
Picnic Friendly	Not particularly
Clean Bathrooms / Changing Areas	Yes, though dated
Water Bottle Filler	No
Best Ages	5+
Apparel Recommendation	Plan for the outdoor weather with wind
Gear Recommendation	Ergo or Tula for babies/young toddlers, stroller for older toddlers to kindergarten
Sunscreen / Bug Spray?	Yes / No
Best Season to Visit	Fall
Breastfeeding Friendliness	Friendly enough, see below

PLIMOTH PATUXET LAYOUT

The Plimoth Patuxet Museum consists of three main sites. The Historic Patuxet Homesite, the 17th Century English Village and the Craft Center are all located at 137 Warren Avenue in Plymouth, MA. Parking here is free. We went the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and we had no issue getting a spot. If you’re going around the time of the Plymouth Thanksgiving Day Parade, you may run into some parking issues.

The Grist Mill and the Mayflower II are located about 2.5 miles away from the main museum campus. There is metered street parking, or paid lot parking. We chose the lot parking because street parking with three munchkins can be a bit daunting. Lot parking was $2 per hour.

PLIMOTH EXHIBITS & PLAY AREAS

Parents’ Favorite

The wetu and general Patuxet homesite. This is how families (and people) are meant to live. The wetu was cozy, and the lifestyle of living with the land and the seasons is something we really need to get back to.

Kids’ Favorite

Well, this is a first. We asked each of our kiddos and they each said something different! Our oldest tells us that her favorite experience was the wetu. Our middle had the time of her life exploring the Mayflower II, and our youngest (3) said “um goats.”

Least Favorite

The English Village as a whole. What a total bummer this place was. Except apparently the goats were a highlight for our youngest (3). Now listen: the museum is exceptionally well organized and the level of detail they have gone to is impressive. When I say it was a bummer, I mean energetically. I could feel the struggle of these people, and everything felt cold and gray, despite having a clear blue sky. It did not feel like a place where people enjoyed their lives or somewhere I would like to live. Which is why it’s so important to pass our stories down from generation to generation.

BIOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS

Plimoth Patuxet offers an onsite cafe, with a decently sized eating area around the corner. In addition, there is a dedicated picnic area below the visitor center, though I did not venture over there. I personally enjoy using food as a distraction on long car rides, so we opted to dole out snacks between the main village and the Mayflower and then lunch on the way home.

The Mayflower II, however, is right on a main drag with a ton of restaurants to choose from. Consider this when planning the flow of your day.

Depending on your comfort level, breastfeeding at Plimoth should be easy enough. I didn’t see any dedicated nursing areas, but there is a theater in the visitor center, as well as benches throughout the journey.

The bathrooms at Plimoth are clean and sanitary, though dated. Although terrible for my respiratory health, as an ex-microbiology analyst for biotech, I appreciate smelling the cleaning agents in public restrooms. At least I know someone has been in there wiping stuff down. This was the case at the Plimoth museum.

The main site has restrooms at the visitor center and the craft center. These bathrooms are male/female, and there are changing tables in the female bathrooms. My husband tells me he “doesn’t remember seeing one” when asked about the changing table facilities in the men’s department. At the Mayflower site, there are bathrooms located next to the beach, right before the Mayflower check-in area. You can’t miss them.

GERMS & SAFETY

Plimoth is an open-air living history museum. Infectious disease-type germs don’t really like fresh air and sunshine. There isn’t much concern about germs here, except for if you touch the critters in the village, in which case, you can wash your hands at the craft center. I always load my kids up on probiotics when we go somewhere and then wash hands throughout the trip (and especially before we eat). If you follow that protocol, I’d say this is a pretty safe bet germ-wise.

Tips & Tricks for an Awesome Day

Plan for wind.

Holy whack, Batman. The wind was insane. We’ve been having a particularly windy few weeks in New England, but this was bananas. Obviously, the wind was worse coming off the bay, and in normal weather, would’ve probably just been breezy. Whatever the case, plan for it. You don’t want to be miserable on your adventure. For reference, the daytime high the day we went was 43, and we all wore down coats and winter boots.

Visit earlier in the month.

I have yet to decide if it’s better to visit a place and then read about it or read about it and then visit it. After this trip, I think I’m in the visit first camp. Visiting Plimoth earlier in November is a good idea, because the weather is generally calmer. By the end of the month, New England is moving into more unsettled weather, and we’ve had Thanksgiving days with freak blizzards as well as 19 degrees and flash freezing. We’ve also had Thanksgivings that required nothing more than a thick sweatshirt. It’s always a toss-up toward the end of the month as mother nature shifts into winter mode.

Bring sunglasses.

If you’re coming from somewhere else, you need to understand that the glare driving East toward the coast in the morning is not something to mess around with. Cars hit their brakes in a hurry and if you can’t see, you’re toast. But here’s the rub: if you’re driving IN to Plimoth in the morning, you’ll also be driving toward the sunset in the evening. The glare here is horrible and is made worse in the winter months with the pitch of the sun. Don’t be caught off-guard: bring sunglasses and make sure they are polarized to decrease the glare.

Pack snacks and water.

We spent about 90 minutes at the village site, and about 30ish minutes at the Mayflower II. We could’ve easily spent more time at both, but the kids were getting hungry at the village, and they were cold and tapped out at the Mayflower. You’ll want to pack snacks for at least four hours and then double the expected drive time. We hit a fair amount of traffic heading North on Sunday afternoon, and the drive south was totally gridlocked.

Read books.

One of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that I know exactly what my kids are reading for their education. If your kids are in public, private or charter schools, check with the teachers to see what they’ve already read and fill in, as appropriate. We had great experiences with Three Young Pilgrims and Pilgrim Stories. I loved how the authors used primary sources to create captivating stories and bring the reader into the experience. Instead of “the pilgrims suffered terrible hardship” the stories are told from the perspective of the people living it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that we did not read any books from the Native American perspective this year. That’s because I made an intentional decision to cover only one perspective per year. My oldest covered Native Americans last year with her nature program in 2023, so we chose to focus on Pilgrims this year. As a result, I cannot and will not make any recommendations about literature capturing the Native American perspective until I’ve read it myself.

Prepare the kids for the living history experience.

During undergrad, I took a class called “insects.” The teacher was such an interesting human, and she talked about the insects as if she were one. She was always “in character,” and you can expect that at the Plimoth Museums. This totally threw my kids for a loop and they had a hard time adjusting. They did not expect the English accents or the actors to address us as they would have during the 1620s. It’s probably good to prepare your children for what to expect, lest they think they stepped into a time warp.

Worth the Drive?

Yes! As a homeschool mama, I think this is a fantastic opportunity for a field trip. As a human being, I think this is a wonderful opportunity to experience history the way it was meant to be learned. History should never have been taught through textbooks, and the minute that became the norm, we lost the important art of telling our stories and understanding where we came from. Undoubtedly, visiting opened up all sorts of interesting conversations between my husband and I about the type of home we’d prefer to live in. Moreover, it gave us a unique perspective as to why New Englanders often seem so aloof.

If you’re coming from far away, I think you could make an amazing (and historical) week out of Boston, Salem and Plimoth. Without a doubt, if you’re within day-trip distance and you haven’t been, you’re missing out on a fantastic opportunity to relearn something you thought you already knew! Buy yourself a copy of Pilgrim Stories and learn history the way it’s meant to be shared. Wherever you’re coming from, I think this one is worth a visit.