Bone Ride

Tour de Turtle Bone Ride: Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston, Plymouth

Tour de Turtle Bone Ride: Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston, Plymouth

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We haven’t done a Tour de Turtle bone ride in a while, so we were overdue. If you’re not familiar with the bone ride series, we’re going to every town in Massachusetts on various bone rides and ranking them from nicest to crappiest on each trip. After we’re done we’re gonna put together a megalist and rank the biggest dumps in Massachusetts so you can at least know that there is a place that is worse than your home town. Unless you live in Lawrence. Then you’re fucked. Here’s the ones we’ve been to already:

Plainville, North Attleboro, Attleboro, Rehoboth, Seekonk, Swansea, Somerset, Dighton, Berkely, Taunton

Fall River, Westport, Dartmouth, New Bedford, Acushnet, Fairhaven, Mattapoisett, Marion, Rochester

Salisbury, Newburyport, Newbury, Rowley, Ipswich, Essex, Gloucester, Rockport, and Manchester By The Sea

Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, Malden, Everett, Chelsea, Revere, Winthrop

Holden, Princeton, Sterling, Lancaster, Clinton, Bolton, Berlin, Boylston, West Boylston.

Braintree, Quincy, Weymouth, Rockland, Abington, Whitman, Brockton, Avon, Holbrook, Randolph

Paxton, Rutland, Hubbardston, Barre, Oakham, North Brookfield, New Braintree, Hardwick, Ware

Chelmsford, Lowell, Dracut, Methuen, Lawrence, Haverhill, North Andover, Andover, Tewksbury

Auburn, Oxford, Sutton, Douglas, Webster, Dudley, Southbridge, Charlton, East Brookfield, Spencer, Leicester

Boston: Brighton, Allston, Fenway, Back Bay, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Roslindale, West Roxbury, Hyde Park, Mattapan, Dorchester, Southie, Downtown, East Boston, Charlestown

Westfield, West Springfield, Agawam, Longmeadow, East Longmeadow, Springfield, Chicopee, Holyoke, Easthampton

Leominster, Lunenburg, Shirley, Ayer, Groton, Pepperell, Townsend, Ashby, Fitchburg

Deerfield, Montague, Greenfield, Leyden, Colrain, Shelburne, Buckland, Hawley, Charlemont, Heath

Lynnfield, Peabody, Saugus, Lynn, Nahant, Swampscott, Marblehead, Salem, Beverly, and Danvers

Millbury, Grafton, Northbridge, Uxbridge, Millville, Blackstone, Bellingham, Mendon, Hopedale, Milford

Sturbridge, Holland, Wales, Brimfield, Monson, Palmer, Warren, West Brookfield, Brookfield

WestminsterGardnerAshburnhamWinchendonRoyalstonAtholOrangePhillipstonTempleton

That’s 151 out of 351 towns and cities we’ve now been to. Time to add these eight to the list. We visited the towns in this order: Hingham, Hull, Cohasset, Scituate, Marshfield, Duxbury, Kingston, Plymouth. Keep in mind that all of these towns are quite lovely. None of them have any shot at being ranked in the top 40 biggest dumps when push comes to shove. But someone has to come in last when you’re ranking 8 towns, so don’t take it personally….Plymouth.

 

 

1. Cohasset 

Cohasset is amazing. Literally perfect. The beach is hardly crowded at all, the houses are gigantic, the neighborhoods are lovely, the insanely high property values keep the riff-raff out, it’s the smallest populated town on the bone ride, and theres no traffic. What’s not to like?

 

 

2. Duxbury

Another fabulous town you’d be lucky to live in. A little more residential than Cohasset is since it’s twice the size. Everyone keeps their lawns looking nice with a fresh coat of mulch. No one has 30 satellite dishes on the roof. There are no sneakers hanging from the power lines. Vagrants and sign guys are few and far between. And they arguably had one of the best beaches we saw at the remote Duxbury town beach.

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3. Hingham

Hingham was the only town we visited whose water front was Boston Harbor instead of the Atlantic Ocean. So for the reason it has less of a beach town feel, and more of a suburban community, townie feel. But it’s a really nice community to live in. You got your super rich mansion folk closer to the shore, and your upper middle class $800,000, 2,500 square foot homes in beautiful suburbia as you go south. That’s what slummin it looks like in Hingham.

 

 

4. Kingston

The further away you get from the ocean, the nicer Kingston gets. There’s one whole area near the country club that looks like paradise. Like you’re on the set of Desperate Housewives or something. The drawbacks are that this is what constitutes a beach in Kingston, since it has such a short coastline:

And the part near Plymouth is shitty with traffic. Other than that Kingston seems like a bad place to go if you’re trying to sell food stamps to ratchets.

 

 

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5. Scituate

Cheesehogs and fupasloths are few and far between in Scituate. It’s got a bunch of beaches, although some of them are pretty rocky. The neighborhoods are modest and don’t look like they’re trying to show off, although there are some really nice cribs the closer you get to the ocean.

 

 

6. Marshfield

People from the South Shore call Marshfield “Marsh Vegas.” Not sure why, because I didn’t see any EBT-Rex’s playing bobbing for bananas with homeless dudes in wheelchairs. Very rarely did we see anything that would be considered unsightly, except for the occasional “free” camper that’s been sitting there since the Clinton administration.

And for some reason there seems to be a fire station, made out of a residential house, with a Scituate fire engine parked in it:

In Marshfield. Because that makes sense.

The beach we went to was too rocky for my taste, but it’s got a bunch of beaches so maybe they’re nicer. Other than that it’s a quaint suburban paradise.

 

 

 

7. Hull

Hull is very different from the other towns on the bone ride. It’s a peninsula that’s shaped like it’s fingerblasting Boston Harbor:

And as a result of living in a long, skinny town, it’s got a Manhattan like grid street plan, with a Hampton beach feel to it. It’s definitely noticeably more blue collar than the rest of the towns we visited, with more modest and close-quartered houses, but it’s a crowded beach town so you get what you get. Nantasket Beach is pretty awesome, although when the tide comes in it looks like the elderly people in beach chairs are about to be swallowed by the ocean.

 

 

8. Plymouth

My biggest beef with Plymouth is it’s way too damn big. It’s like a friggin state. We only saw a fraction of it, and we intended on getting to Wareham but had to cancel because we ran out of rolling papers halfway through Plymouth. So to get from one place to another in Plymouth you’re often traveling on double lane roads or highway.

Honestly, I was expecting a lot worse because we’ve written so many Plymouth blogs before. And granted, the cultural section of North Plymouth, close to the Kingston border, features some interesting lawn decorations, grown men chilling at noon on a Thursday, and run down buildings.

Here’s the thing with the beach situation at Plymouth. Just like Duxbury, Plymouth has this chub looking land strip thrusting out into the Atlantic:

So getting there is a out of the way. They have other beaches though, but the chub land strip makes it feel more like a bay:

Still beats Bell Pond though.

But for a town it’s population size (Plymouth is now the second largest “town” in Massachusetts, significantly larger than Fitchburg and Holyoke) Plymouth is 95% quite lovely, quaint, and suburban.

 

Anyway, we really need to get a map and start coloring in the places we’ve been to. You’ll notice that we’ve neglected the 413. So the next bone ride needs to be to Western MA. I’m thinking a Rowe, Monroe, Florida, Clarksburg, Williamstown, North Adams, Adams, New Ashford, Hancock, Lanesboro, Pittsfield, Berkshire bone ride is in order.

 

 

We urge you to support the following local businesses. 

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6 Comment(s)
  • August 31, 2017 at 3:39 pm

    You were wise to not include Wareham, which doesn’t fit with Duxbury, Cohasset et al… this article, minus Weymouth and Quincy, basically covers the Irish Riviera. The ‘Ham is very, very South Coast. The difference is either Per Capita Income or % of Portuguese or Irish in the population. You should have put ?ham in the South Coast Bone Ride, but it would work (on a technicality) if you did a Bourne/Falmouth/Sandwich Upper Cape article. Wareham could also be their own article, if you came down with the warhammer.

  • Nancy C.
    July 23, 2017 at 11:21 pm

    Hi Turtleboy- The Scituate Fire Truck was actually in Scituate, believe it or not. That is in Humarock, which is a village of Scituate. The Portland Gale of 1898 separated Humarock from the rest of Scituate.

  • Rick Flair
    July 23, 2017 at 9:27 am

    This bone ride made Mass look desirable, Cohasset is too good to be true. If Obama had known about Cohasset he would have brought 1,000 FEMA trailers with occupants to make things (fair). Not to worry on the next bone ride Pittsfield will balance it out all on it’s own.

  • Renee's Chin Drippings
    July 22, 2017 at 11:15 pm

    The great thing about these old new england towns is they actually use to “warn out” people. In other words, if you came to down and were a deadbeat, the town politely asked you to leave (and if you didn’t… well… you got escorted out.) Its really fun to read some of the old minutes by the Town Clerks in the 16-1700’s in towns like Scituate. Brings a tear to my eye… the days when people still had testicles and none of this silly PC bs.

  • whatevuh
    WHATEVUH
    July 22, 2017 at 10:52 pm

    I’m guessing none of these towns has a large population of Negroes, or Latinos, just a guess, but I bet I’m right!

    • turtlelover
      July 22, 2017 at 11:04 pm

      Good

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