With the way this year has been going, the Wonderful Husband and I decided that we needed to snap out of our routine and shake things up a little bit for Thanksgiving. We kicked around a few ideas, before finally we got from Thanksgiving to turkey to pilgrims to Mayflower and voilà! Where better to go for Thanksgiving than back to where it all started? So, we headed to Plymouth, Massachusetts, and then continued up the coast to visit my favorite city of all time, Boston.

I’ve been planning the Boston trip for years. Having lived there for a few years, I consider it my home away from home, and I couldn’t wait to introduce the kids to a few of my favorite haunts. Boston is a tricky city, though, and I didn’t want to have to mess around with strollers or carrying tired toddlers, since I expected we would be on foot for most of the trip.

Additionally, a lot of the historical attractions require a little bit more of a mature audience, or at least one that can sit still for longer than three minutes. Over the years, I’ve taken many friends, including the WH, on Boston trips, and I enjoy mixing visits to all my favorite holes in the wall with the typical Boston touristy stops, but I didn’t quite think the kids were ready for it until now.

When I was about E’s age, my family went to Massachusetts for our summer vacation, and our trip into Boston to meet relatives made a lasting impression on me, so much so that I knew I wanted to live there some day. With the kids’ recent interest in American history, this just felt like the right time to make our own first pilgrimage.

Once I started planning the trip, I was even more excited to see that we could actually eat Thanksgiving dinner at Plymouth Plantation with the Pilgrims and Native Americans. We also started planning far enough in advance that I was able to scour travel websites and find great deals on both our hotel in Plymouth and our lodging in Boston. I set an alert on Groupon for Boston attractions and was able to score a few more package deals on admissions to some of the attractions that we might not have done otherwise. Although we wanted a quick getaway, we didn’t want to break the bank.

With reservations made, activities planned and the kids’ excitement mounting, all we needed was for the weather to hold out, and even though there was some talk of a white Thanksgiving, it quickly passed, and we had beautiful weather for the entire trip. Sometimes, it just feels like things are meant to be.

The kids were counting down the days. We should have had an Advent calendar for the trip. While I wouldn’t call them seasoned travelers, we do travel enough that they approach these kinds of trip with a grand sense of adventure. Their requirements for a good vacation are pretty simple. Mostly, it’s just that the hotel has a pool and that there will be ice cream.

Ice cream was simple enough to guarantee, but finding a hotel with a pool in the heart of Boston proved to be a sticking point. I assured them that we’d be so busy, they wouldn’t even miss it. Luckily, the after-dark ghost tour of Boston kept them entranced for most of the evening, and no one even missed the pool.

Although we had a schedule and tried to catch as many of the free speakers as we could along the Freedom Trail, we also allowed for plenty of time to just kick back and relax. We spent most of Thanksgiving evening wandering around Plymouth Harbor.

The kids wanted to walk all the way out to the end of the breakwater in the harbor, so we did. Then we lingered over Plymouth Rock, (which was, much to everyone’s disappointment, really just a rock), and watched a spectacular sunset.

The next morning, the kids chased squirrels across the Boston Public Garden, and eagerly pitched “crates of tea” into the harbor at the Boston Tea Party museum. We picked our way through several cemeteries and checked out Paul Revere’s house.

We made not one, but two trips back to Quincy Market to dine on barbecue chicken, fried rice, ice cream, macaroni and cheese, and of course, a bowl of “chowda.” We took several trips on the T, which fulfilled G’s lifelong dream of riding on a subway.

On our last morning, we raced (I use that term loosely) to the top of the Bunker Hill monument, and then headed out to meander around Boston University, ending up with lunch at the pizza place next to my freshman dorm, which the kids decided was maybe their favorite pizza ever. I don’t know if it was the pizza or the atmosphere, but it tasted pretty darn good to me, too.

Will we travel every Thanksgiving? Probably not, but it was fun to step outside of our box this year and do something truly memorable.

Just in case we didn’t have enough good memories, there was one more surprise in store for us. When we arrived home Saturday evening, everyone made a mad dash for the facilities, whereupon the upstairs toilet sort of exploded. Not being a toilet expert, I’m gathering that some sort of seal may have dried out over the course of not being used for a few days and cracked.

Good food, good memories and an exploding toilet. Sounds like a recipe for a perfect family holiday to me!

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.