Date: June 2011
Position: 41° 79′ N 70°31′W
Weather: Springtime
Cape Cod
Rash decisions on Expedia late at night can lead to the coolest roadies. It just so happened that we had the Monday off for Cup Match – a cricket fixture of national importance on the Bermuda calendar. I spotted a return flight to Boston for about $150. Without thinking about it too much, I chucked in the credit card number and viola, Boston booked for the weekend. Now to find accommodation. That is when things got fun.
Trawling through every accommodation website known to man, the only room I could find in Boston was at the Waldorf Astoria for about a couple of grand for two nights. Now that did not fit with my cheap as budget. There was nothing in my price range. No backpackers, B&B, dorms, hostels, hotels or motels anywhere. I decided to leave that headache for the next day.
I was whining to my colleagues at work about this sorry state of affairs. They all laughed at me and said “it is graduation week for Harvard and MIT. Accommodation will have booked out months ago! Then they all made the silly suggestion that I postpone my trip! For $150, no way. Boston it was and who needs sleep for 48 hours? I was sure I could entertain myself in a city for that long! Then I thought, everywhere is probably going to be crazy busy. Maybe, I should head out of town.
The car
12 Hours later, I picked up a rental car at Logan International Airport, destination Cape Cod. As it was my first time driving in the US – the wrong side of the road for me – I thought I would be smart, book an automatic car with a GPS. The lady at the counter gave me a funny look when I asked her if she had a book of road rules I could borrow. I find its quite handy knowing who has the right of way at intersections etc. Having just handed over my drivers NZ drivers licence which states in big letters “learner” (if you have a full car licence, but a learner endorsement for motorcycle, your licence says learner).
She didn’t even bat an eyelid as she handed over the keys for a brand new Ford Fusion. Then I made a complete arse of my self – chatting with a lovely guy outside, I opened the door on the wrong side, dumped all my stuff and then had to make it look like that was deliberate. I made it out of the lot with no major dramas and discovered two minutes later I was on a toll road. Thank god there was a card payment lane. I love making $1.50 transactions on my credit card!
Pilgrims Highway
The drive to the cape is pretty simple – follow the Pilgrims highway south for about an hour, go over the big bridge and voila, there you are. I somehow managed to annoy the GPS by ducking off the main road to explore food and shopping options along the way. Having that damn backseat navigator bitching at me to turn back every two minutes reminded me why it is so nice to travel by oneself.
I started wishing I had taken a road map instead. We made it in relative peace until we go to the roundabout (in US parlance a circle way) in Hyannis. I was trying to work out why I was taking the seventh exit on the circus (GPS with a tinny accent is not the easiest to understand) and ended up going around the thing about three times before I worked the correct lane for my exit. It was with great relief I pulled into my accommodation five minutes later.
Hyannis
The B&B I was staying at was fabulous. It was run by a massive Russian woman, with rosy cheeks and grey hair (she stuffed us all with muffins and toast at breakfast time). I didn’t realise you could put so many lace curtains on one window, and no walls were the same. It looked like an American quilt had exploded, then collided with about 20 different styles of rose-patterned wallpaper. Mum would have been impressed with the variety of doilies on every surface. It was brilliant. I dived into the pile of pamphlets on the bedside table and formulated a cunning plan for my next 24 hours of intensive exploration of Cape Cod.
Food and Photos
You can’t escape seafood on the cape. It has a rightly deserved reputation for the quality of its chowders, lobster dishes and not to mention, the Wellfleet oysters. For these alone, it’s no surprise the Pilgrims were loath to move. The other thing about the cape is the shipwrecks. The cape itself is a long low lying sandbar. The coastline is windswept, prone to fog and the harbours a known to freeze over in the winter time. All of these things are hazardous to shipping, so lighthouses sprung up everywhere. One of the great dangers to many of these is the shifting coastline. As the coastline weathers away, lighthouses have to be shifted further inland! The beaches are long and sweeping, windswept and wild along the Atlantic, calm and collected on Cod Bay.
Working my way up the coastline, I ate every permutation of clam chowder, deep-fried clams, lobster rolls and oysters I could find. Lighthouses, beaches, parks, windmills and monuments rounded out the drive. By the time I rolled into Provincetown, I was full, my memory card was full, and my RDI for energy intake blown five hours earlier. As luck would have it, the weekend I travelled was the weekend before Memorial Weekend, the start of the US holiday season.
There was no one around Cape Cod, meaning I had personalised tours around lighthouses. The custodians were bored and excited to see a tourist! The cafes and restaurants I stopped at were not busy. All the waitresses had heaps of time to chat with me and recommend other food stops. There were no issues with traffic and parking (great, as I had scared the wits out of myself and a bunch of locals when I made a wee faux pas turning left at a traffic light). It was a successful day all up.
The Plantation
Day two dawned, and I set off after another massive breakfast with the aim of working my way slowly back up the coast to Boston. One of the pamphlets in my room was for a place called the Plimoth Plantation. It was a Museum the recreated the site of the original Wampanoag Village and the English Village where the Pilgrims landed. It also maintained the Mayflower II, a replica of the original ship that bought the pilgrims to the US. I have always been a bit dodgy about “cultural experiences”.
My first encounter with this form of tourism was at an island resort, watching an awful fire dancing show. I remember just wanting to walk out thinking it was a very “made for tourist show, with limited authenticity”. It put me off these things for life. I considered long an hard about going to this. I’ve also never been a fan of watching reenactment style entertainment. And then I thought, I will probably never be back here again and will probably never have a chance to visit an Indian village. So I decided to go. It was one of the best choices I have made when travelling.
The Villages
You start off with a walk through the museum and an audiovisual display that explains how the Plantation came to be. Built on the original village sites, it aims to show the indigenous village compared to the English village established next door. The Wampanoag village was a working village. Daily life continued as it would have. Everyone was more than happy to discuss what the traditional village routines where and how the English settlement impacted on village life. Unfortunately for me, they had completed making a dugout about two days before that!
Then you walk into the English village. You are warned these people are all actors. When you talk to them, they are carrying on daily tasks and will speak to you in the manner of the time. Put it this way; colonialism has a lot to answer for. As it was the pre-holiday season, I got to talk to many people.
Mayflower II
From the Plantation, I headed down to Plymouth Harbour for a spin around the Mayflower II. It is a replica of the original ship that sailed from Plymouth, the UK with the pilgrims looking for the New World. This version was built in the UK as thanks for the US efforts in world war two and sailed the passage as the pilgrims did. They even managed to get hit by a late-season hurricane off Bermuda. At the time I visited, there where only a handful of people left from the original crew, and not many others with the skills required to sail a ship in this configuration.
What amazed me was how small it was. Considering it took 102 customers, about 30 crew, supplies needed for the voyage, animals, weapons etc., the conditions must have been horrific. I couldn’t walk around down below. I had to crouch. The crew quarters (well captains anyway) which were almost luxurious compared to the passengers who slept on the gun deck where pretty spartan. The erroneous conclusion I arrived at was everyone was a lot shorter in those days.
I had a quiet chuckle to myself walking around Plymouth. The historic district lays claim to the oldest street in the 13 original colonies – layed in 1620. Coming from a former colony myself, I love the way we call stuff old when it’s not that old – ignoring the original inhabitant’s byways!
Onwards to Boston
My flight out was early the next morning. It was back to Boston to divest myself of the trusty rental car, and fingers crossed, find somewhere to stay. I lucked out completely and secured a room that included shuttle service at the first hotel I called. A lovely old man came and picked me up, giving me a guided tour of the Italian district, old governors house and a rundown of the history of the area on our way out to Winthrop. Setting off for a quick walk around, I found the yacht club and a Marina with nice views of the city skyline. A delicious local Italian restaurant provided my last seafood feed of the weekend.
