Student Travel Educational Tours

Cape Cod Educational Tour

Provincetown, Cape Cod, Massachusetts is an important historic destination for any student tours wanting firsthand exposure to the very place where the Pilgrims first stepped ashore in the New World in 1620.  

Contemplating their future settlement and how they would survive a rapidly approaching winter, the Pilgrim leaders quickly realized they would need to form an alliance with the ‘Strangers’ on board the Mayflower who had come to the New World in search of adventure and fortune. The resulting covenant, the Mayflower Compact, established that both the ‘Saints’ and ‘Strangers’ would live together under the rule of law rather than ecclesiastic law so that both groups could coexist and still be free to pursue their separate goals. The Mayflower Compact and its then radically democratic concepts are viewed by historians as a foundation for the U.S. Constitution. 

This story of the Pilgrims’ First Landing and the Mayflower Compact is presented at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum (PMPM) on High Pole Hill in Provincetown. This year, 2010, is the centennial of the dedication of the Pilgrim Monument in 1907 and a lavish event week is planned for August. PMPM is an American Bus Association (ABA) top 100 destination for 2010 and is equipped to handle school travel groups and their buses.  

Attractions: Find out more about popular Cape Cod Attractions	Hotels: Four Points by Sheraton Eastham Cape Cod

Provincetown is one of the top five ports in the world for whale watching, providing educational tours close access to the ancestral feeding grounds of large marine mammals, most notably the North Atlantic humpback whale, within the Stellwagen National Marine Sanctuary, just eight miles out of our port. The Dolphin Fleet Whale Watch originated whale watching on the East Coast in 1975 and provides a 3-4 hour excursion offshore guided by experienced naturalists, many of whom are teachers and scientists practicing what they preach. The Dolphin Fleet operates four large vessels to accommodate educational tours in addition to general public.  

Provincetown is also regarded as America’s oldest continuous art colony. Charles Hawthorne established his Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown in 1899, bringing the ‘en plein’ air French Impressionist movement to America, largely made possible by the invention of oil paint tubes that made painting outdoors practical. Eugene O’Neill, considered the father of modern American theater, mounted his first play here on a wharf in Provincetown’s East End in 1915. Around that time resident painters, writers and dramatists founded a cooperative gallery called the Provincetown Art Association. Today it is known as PAAM, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum and provides an impressive venue for school groups seeking the origins of American art, literature and theater. 

But student and educational travel groups are also expected to have fun in Provincetown. Over seventy-five percent of Provincetown’s land mass is preserved as an ocean park, the Cape Cod National Seashore. 

The Seashore Park provides opportunity for youth groups to be at the ocean, on a bike trail, hiking on the sand dunes, or listening to a Park Ranger. And most of these activities are available to student groups at no cost. Provincetown is also the only town in America with three working lighthouses and artists’ dune shacks. Federally-permitted Art’s Dunes Tours provides over-sand access to student groups to these remote and truly unique environments within the Seashore Park.