Cape Cod Day 1

We landed around 7:30 in the morning on Thursday. That gave me two days to unpack, do laundry, repack for a completely different sort of vacation, and give my kitties some love before getting on the road again. I was more than up for the challenge. This morning, G3 and I set out for Cape Cod. Mom rented a house for the week. She knows how much G3 and I miss the  Mattituck house and spending time at the beach. Mattituck, without Dad, is depressing, so she wanted to go somewhere else and she knows how much we love it out here. My brother also really likes it here, and since Mom wanted to spend time with both of her children and her grandson she opted for Cape Cod as the destination for a family vacation.

I was eleven years old—forty years ago—the first time I came to Cape Cod. Back then, Dad rented a house in Eastham for two weeks. I don’t remember too much about that vacation. I remember the ocean water being cold and only Dad and I wanted to swim in it. My mother and brother preferred the warmer bay. We went to both beaches in an attempt to keep everyone happy. One day, we ventured up to P-town and went whale watching, but we only saw dolphins. I remember not seeing whales, but I don’t remember getting sick on the boat which is odd because I always get sick. Maybe I just blocked it out, but I didn’t block out Dad getting sick. One night for dinner, Dad ate clam strips with the bellies and got violently ill. That was also summer we took a day trip from Eastham to Plimouth Plantation and Plymouth Rock and my love of visiting historic sites while on vacation was born.

After going to Plymouth, I begged Dad to take me to Boston. (I wrote about this in my COVID memoir.) I wanted to see where the Massacre and Tea Party took place, as well as where Paul Revere rode. I had learned about those events in school and I thought seeing the locations would somehow make them feel more real. Dad said ‘no.’ Boston was further than Plymouth which meat it was too far to go just for a day I was disappointed but Dad didn’t forget my request. One morning, he woke me up early because it was raining. Since we couldn’t go to the beach, we went to Boston. We had trouble finding the site of the Massacre. It was in the middle of a street and we must have walked over it three or four times before we noticed the marker. I still remember standing at the edge of the water, trying to envision a ship docked and tea being tossed out overboard. Finally, we boarded the USS Constitution—Old Iron Side—for a tour. The ship served in the War of 1812 and I asked the tour guide what caused the war. He didn’t know and that upset me. It seemed important information, the type of information a tour guide should know. And that was years before Google, so I was left hanging, not knowing the answer, and it frustrated me enough that I never forgot it.

It wasn’t just my love of traveling to experience history that was born in Cape Cod. This is where my enjoyment of National Parks also began. I believe the National Seashore was the first National Park Unit I visited. One night, we went to a ranger led campfire program where we had to write a haiku. I wrote one about cicadas but I have no idea what I actually said in the poem. My brother remembers a walk through the marshes using red lights. I wonder if it was the same program. Now, all these years later, I have been to dozens of park units throughout 48 states and I’ve attended numerous ranger programs and yet my first stop when arriving on the Cape was the National Park’s visitor center. It’s a habit I may never break. Even if I am familiar with a place, I like to see what might be new or what programs might be of interest.

G3 and I got to Eastham by 4:00, but my mother and brother were still a few hours behind us. It was raining, so we couldn’t go to the beach. Nor could we go to the house since my brother had to pick up the keys. Therefore, I checked my Geocaching app and was happy to find a few adventure caches nearby. We did one that started at the visitors center and had four other locations—that included the Coast Guard beach and Nauset lighthouse —to drive to.  One of the stops was Doane Rock. It is one of the largest boulders carried and deposited by a glacier in Southeast New England and the largest on Cape Cod. It rises 18 feet out of the ground and is believed to reach 12 feet below ground. Since I drove to each spot, G3 begrudgingly did the caches with me. However, when I drove over to Fort Hill for a second set of Adventure caches that required me to get out of the car and hike in the rain, he opted to stay behind.

I have been to Cape Cod numerous times, but I had never been to Fort Hill. I am always excited to find new places and to explore different things, especially if I learn something along the way. Pilgrims settled Nauset—now called Eastham—in 1644. (In 1620, Pilgrims actually touched down in what is now Provincetown before deciding to continue on to Plymouth. I’m not sure why they leave that tidbit of information out of many textbooks.) Anyway, shortly after setting up residence in Nauset, the Pilgrims erected a fort up on a hill overlooking the salt marshes below. At the time, European settlers from other countries, such as the Dutch in New Amsterdam, posed the greatest threat to them. When the pilgrims arrived, the area was already inhabited by the Wampanoag. While England, thanks to the Pilgrims, made the first European settlement on Wampanoag land, Samuel de Champlain, the French explorer, actually charted the area first. He sailed into the bay but fled after the Wampanoag engaged him in a skirmish.

Before getting in the car, I checked out the Penniman House, a colorful building in Fort Hill. The first story was painted yellow but the second story bore brown and red stripes. Captain Penniman was a whaling captain in the mid 1800s. He went on a total of seven whaling expeditions that took him as far as Hawaii and the Arctic. Occasionally, he took his wife and children to sea with him. He had the house built in 1868.

I would have gone and done another cache but G3 was antsy to get to the house and Mom and Gary were picking up the key. It’s a nice house—spacious enough for all of us. Mom and Gary have their own rooms but G3 and I are sharing. There is a ping pong table in the basement which made G3 happy and a large deck with wicker chairs and a table. As soon as we unpacked the cars, Mom took us to PJ’s for dinner. It’s a seafood joint. G3 ordered clam strips and the rest of us had grilled shrimp tacos. The tacos were good—better than I expected.

G3 and I played ping pong for a while but it was getting late. There will be more time to play during the week. Needless to say, I miss my cats. My brother brought his cat and dog and Samson—the cat—is very cuddly. I love having a cat cuddle with me in bed but it also makes me miss Dante more.