Cape Cod for the Beginner and the (Not-So-) Hardy (July 31)

After spending Monday on the road driving from Niagara Falls to Cape Cod, we set up our tent and had a beautifully comfortable evening settling into the campsite. We walked down to the campground’s pond, where the sun was setting over the water, and another family was catching frogs with a net. A little girl ran over to show her frogs to our kids, and when she uncovered her bucket, they both hopped out and away. Natalie caught one, and the other sat about a foot into the pond staring at us. The girl got the net from her dad and recaptured her victim.

Tuesday morning came, as did the usual groans that we were just having cereal at our campsite while the smells of bacon and eggs rose up from sites all around us. We packed for the day and went to explore the Cape Cod National Seashore.

The Seashore is a long strip of surprisingly hilly land, dotted by salt marsh ponds full of green swamp grass and serviced by one main highway that is frequently jammed with cars. We asked at the Visitors’ Center for suggestions on what to do, and we got some good advice.

First we drove up to a trail over the dunes, where we could walk out near a sandbar at low tide to see the grey seals enjoying what appeared to be seal happy hour. They all swim to the same spot, haul their hulking bodies up onto the finger of sand, and lay around alternately bawling and striking seal yoga poses. A few stalker seals would sit in the water with just their eyes showing, staring straight at us, sort of the way our dog watches impassively through the front window when we leave the house—sort of cute, sort of creepy. We could hear them from quite a distance—they sounded like the motors of boats and jet skis on a smaller inland lake back home.

Andrew escorted a horseshoe crab back to the water. Allison may have been scared off from swimming on Cape Cod for good—there was a “Recent Shark Sighting” sign posted on the beach. “Soul Surfer,” the movie about the teenage surfer who lost an arm to a shark, has not served us well thus far.

The other cool thing we did was explore tide pools. This is not like the rocky kind you find in California or Oregon, where seastars and anemones lounge in rocky spas. These are more like stones and seaweed and ocean combining to make pools in the sand, where you could see a bazillion crabs, hermit crabs, and snails. Brian and Andrew took their flip flops off to harass the crabs into grabbing the shoes with their pinchers.

The rain that had been threatening for a while finally started coming down while we washed the sand from our feet to get back in the car. We had been watching the radar on Brian’s phone, a sometimes unhealthy thing to do when you are sleeping outdoors. A large green and yellow mass was headed for us, and we were trying to pretend it wasn’t. By now it was 5:00, so we decided to go back to the campground. By the time we got back it had been raining, hard, for an hour. I ducked in the tent, piled everything on the sleeping pads and pulled the duffel bags into the van. We found a good restaurant and sat there for a long time, and it poured, hard, outside for a long time.

Let me just say this. We don’t camp strictly for budgetary reasons, though it definitely makes a longer trip far more affordable. We like a tent because it can fit in our van and doesn’t take much storage or maintenance. We also don’t camp because we are so rugged, but there are certain aspects of camping that are very appealing. Laying in the tent, listening to the wind in the trees, feeling so close to nature. Sitting around the campfire and living outdoors, basically. There is just one major problem for me with all this natural life—water. I have an almost irrational hatred for getting water in the tent. Now, when we stopped by the tent before dinner, there were two small puddles in the front corners of the tent, and some water had obviously dripped from the ceiling. This was ominous.

After dinner we left the restaurant. By now it had been raining, hard, for about 5 hours. Brian humored me by driving around a bit to look for hotels that said “Vacancy” on the sign. Problem was, our campground appears to be in an area of expensive hotels, so the bed and breakfasts that we passed did not look affordable, or even amenable to families. He told me if I was serious about a hotel, I should start googling. I did. I found one hotel that looked cheap. I called and the woman who answered the phone could not tell me if there was a room, but her manager would be back and could call me then. I said no thanks.

Time to go home. We drove up to the gates of the campground at 9:30, only remembering then that the gates close for the night at 10. We got to our tent, and Andrew and Brian took 2 beach towels out into the rain to try to dry out the tent. They were in there for about 10 minutes when panic hit me that in 20 minutes we would be locked into the campground. I called the previous hotel again, and the manager answered. He could give us a room for $99. I turned off the phone and told Brian what he said. Brian, knowing who he was camping with, nodded and got in the car. We made it out of the gate with 10 minutes to spare.

The hotel was nothing special, as expected; we could only guess that someone had at one time expired in a grisly way on the sofa bed, judging from the mattress. But it was otherwise clean enough and everything worked. Sure, the hot and cold water were mixed up on the shower, but on the plus side there was a wall-mounted bottle opener just inside the bathroom door for your hygienic drinking convenience. The good part is we all got a solid night’s sleep, and we are dry, and we will now go back to being the rough and ready campers that we aspire, sort of, to be.