New England Day Trip - America's Stonehenge

CJ leading the way. 

Every time we drive to and from Massachusetts, we drive by a sign that says "America's Stonehenge". Until I'd moved to New Hampshire , I'd never even heard of this place. I always accuse Craig of lying to me when he says it is real. So this weekend, we had some friends visiting from out of town (Hi Sara-marie, I know you're reading this! :-D) and Craig decided we were finally going to go see "America's Stonehenge".

Honestly, I was not expecting to be impressed. I've never seen the real Stonehenge in person, but I've imaged it to be amazing. So the fact that I'd never even heard of America's Stonehenge until I moved to New Hampshire made me doubt that it'd be anything all that exciting.

I was surprisingly wrong. America's Stonehenge was very impressive. First a little background. No one knows for sure who built it. It is believed to either have been built by Native Americans or Vikings who came over to America almost 4000 years ago. Yea, it is believed to be almost 4000 years old, making it quite possibly the oldest man-made structure in America. How did I grow up an hour away and never hear about this?! The people who built it, like the builders of Stonehenge, were experts in astronomy and were able to align the henges perfectly. You'll see from some of the pictures what I mean.

Where you first get to the complex, you have to go to the gift shop to buy your tickets ($11 per adults, $7.50 for kids, free for kid's under 5). I told Sara that the gift shop smelled like hippies. It has a lot of great rocks, sweatshirts, and incense. It's a little kitschy, but nice. After you buy your ticket, there's a short documentary you can watch which tells you more about the complex. We bought CJ a hardhat, modeled to the left by my handsome hubby.

Once you leave the gift shop, you meet the alpacas!! There are currently 4 male and 4 female alpacas. They were very friendly and two came right up to the fence to greet us. One of them had the cutest buck teeth. You can also buy of their fur made into yarn at the gift shop. They were so cute and fluffy and didn't smell as bad as I thought alpacas did.

As you walk through the complex, you see different exhibits of how it is believed the builders may have lived. We walked by this canoe, which is just tiny. We were wondering how they fit their butts into it. My hubby pointed out that since they were on the original Paleo diet, their butts weren't as big as ours. According to the image in front of the canoe, it seems that they knelt in the canoe, they didn't sit in it.

It was a really cool walk. It took probably an hour to walk through the whole complex. We probably could have gone longer but it started to rain. The henges were really cool. There was one part where you could actually walk inside and through the cave. It was amazing to see how they put the rocks together perfectly. There were barely any spaces at all between each rock.

This was a really great day trip. I would definitely recommend it. It was great to learn about this amazing place. My favorite thing was the places that were cut down to perfectly align with the solstices. It is amazing that they had the scientific knowledge to do that.

America's Stonehenge is located in Salem, New Hampshire. It is only 45 minutes from Boston and 30 minutes from Manchester NH. It is right off most major highways and is really easy to get to. For more information, go to the America's Stonehenge website.

Here are some more pictures I took of the visit. 

Amazing that they moved all these stones, the bottom left is the sacrificial table. I tried to convince someone to
lay their head down on it but they wouldn't. It was really creepy to think that people were killed there. 

These line up perfectly with the sunrise and sunset during the solstices. It was amazing how perfectly the cleared these lines. 

There was a celebration for Mother Earth a few days ago for the Summer Solstice. 

Family pictures on the rocks and Uncle Mark practicing how to hold a baby. 

  

CJ peeking at the kids playing under the rocks and the man on their man-walk. They kept leaving us in the dust. 

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