After spending the first half of Day Five on the Hyannis Whale Watcher Cruise, we headed back west toward our Boston hotel, but with one more stopover in mind along the way: the town of Plymouth, location of the celebrated area where those stalwart adventurers known in American textbooks as the Pilgrims settled in 1620, established a new life apart from the Church of England, and invented the Thanksgiving holiday that large American department stores have all but abolished.

In 1889, as a salute to those religious pioneers and their works, the National Monument to the Forefathers was erected, albeit originally with the simpler name of “Pilgrim Monument”. It was later renamed to avoid conflict with another structure with that same label in Provincetown, the place on the eastern edge of Cape Cod where the Pilgrims first walked ashore but decided not to stick around.

Over eight stories tall, the Monument isn’t hard to spot from a distance, though internet mapping sites threw a fit trying to navigate us to it. We ended up parking several blocks away and walking because both Mapquest and Google Maps swore it was “just right there.” Liars, both.

Click here and approach the Forefathers!