Kickin' Back at the Cape (Thursday, August 2)

Today was our last day here in Cape Cod. It’s been sunny and hot, and pretty dang humid too. We started the day off in such a beautiful way—we skipped morning. I know that is sacrilege to many of you, but to me that’s a sure sign of vacation. We slept till 9 (in a tent with 5 people!) then cooked up a huge breakfast around 10:30 to fill the black hole that is currently our 15 year old son.

We had no big plans today; today was a bonus day. We had thought we would stay somewhere between Niagara and Cape Cod, but last week we decided to get to the Cape a day early, giving us this extra full day there. We’d considered a ferry to Nantucket, but it would cost about $200 for all of us, and besides, Allison had made a friend on the playground the night before who was expecting her at 10 AM sharp.

I took the kids to the town of Brewster to do some souvenir shopping, leaving Brian with his book, blissfully ignorant of what we were doing. Then we all got in the car, stopped for an ice cream cone for lunch, and went back to the National Seashore.

There we toured the home of a whaling family. They had made 4 whaling trips as a family, for up to as many as 4 years long! The wife and kids got dropped off in Hawaii while Captain Penniman continued on to the Arctic. I’m thinking Brian needs to get into this line of work. Their house had once been a grandiose place, and I was surprised at the modernity of the kitchen and bathroom (still an outhouse though). The house was built in the late 1860s, and they appear to have used the same plumber who ran the pipes for the campground shower here at Sweetwater Forest Campground. The exposed pipes look exactly the same. The National Park Service bought the home from the whaling captain’s granddaughter in the 1960s.

We thought we’d drive on to the nearby beach, but when we got there the park service said that we could go to the beach, but we couldn’t so much as put our toes in the water as there was a high reading of bacteria, and they were “not even sure what kind of bacteria it is yet.” Do they suspect the flesh-eating sort? Or the kind that you need to make yogurt? Perhaps it is a bread yeast. I don’t know, but it seems a pretty fair guess it is somehow linked to the scores of gamey seals we got a whiff of a couple of days ago.

Okay, the beach was out. This came as a relief to Allison, because we would not be offering ourselves up to the neighborhood shark (she saw the newspaper headline at the camp store and has figured out there was an attack nearby).





I quickly scanned the NPS leaflet for other options, and we noticed the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, which happened to be about a mile from where we were. Perfect. Of course this disappointed the one who was hoping to have another beach day. And it was pretty hot, so no one thought hiking sounded so great.

The wildlife sanctuary has a small but educational nature center, and we learned that the little black stretcher-looking things we’d been playing with the day before were not seedpods for some seaweed, but instead they were the egg sacs for baby skates. Very cool. We took some nature trails through their gardens, past a pond, through the salt marshes, and out to the ocean, where it was nearing low tide. The snails and the crabs didn’t just dot the sand, they covered it. Brian and Andrew walked probably half a mile out into the ocean on sand bars that are completely underwater other parts of the day. Had we found this place sooner, we could have signed up for a nature walk or wildlife cruise, which we would have done in a heartbeat. Still, it was a great place to explore, and aside from us there were maybe 8 other people on the trails.

The one down side to all of this is that, though Allison forgot her fear of sharks, she immediately developed two new ones: poison ivy and, most especially, deer ticks. Thank you, wildlife sanctuary signs. And thank you, Camp Roger nature educators, because now she can rightly identify the things she is so afraid of. You’d think we were exploring Cape Fear, not Cape Cod.

Onward. Tomorrow we’ll drive into Boston for a day. We were planning to go to Concord for the better part of the day to see Louisa May Alcott’s house and Walden Pond. But Andrew is lobbying for the Freedom Trail, and I’m very partial to Boston Commons, so we are veering off course. Brian’s trying to hide his relief at avoiding a day of all early-American, author-related sightseeing, chasing history instead. Shocking as it is, it seems he’s not a huge Alcott fan. We’re still going to take a quick driving tour the following morning so Natalie can see where the “Little Women” author found her voice.

Tonight Natalie mentioned that every time she feels disappointed about something not being what she expected, it eventually turns out that she’s glad it’s not what she expected, because it turns out better than she could have imagined. Now there’s a taste of grace.

So long, Cape Cod. It’s been nice getting acquainted. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard will have to wait.