Saturday, August 24, 2013

New England Trip - Cape Cod

 
Wrapping up our trip to New England, we spent one day touring Cape Cod via a tour van that held 14 people. Terry and Des, our tour guides, were a friendly and funny married couple -- he is from Ireland and speaks with a rich brogue and loves to joke around.  She was a storehouse of information about the Cape. 

We met in Hyannis, boarded the van, and away we went.  We passed houses and learned a lot about the Cape Cod architecture, the half and the full house, and how they painted just the front of the house.  Then the coast came into view again, and we wove in and out, alternating coastal and woods views.  As the day wore on, the weather became cooler and overcast and by the end of the day it was raining.  We were reminded of the beautiful Dan Fogelberg song, "The Reach."  Please listen to it -- the melody makes you "feel" the waves cresting and falling -- and the lyrics are so meaningful.  It was one of my brother's favorite songs and he asked that it be played at his funeral so has special significance to our family.

Some of the sites we saw....
We stopped at the Jonathan Young Mill to take a tour of the windmill.

 
These very old steps are the ones we climbed up into the windmill.




 Everywhere we went in New England we saw beautiful hydrangeas...
 
...and lots of lighthouses.
  
This was the home of Captain Penniman.  Captain's homes were always a bit nicer than others. 
He was a whaling ship master
 This is how it looked back when Captain Penniman lived here!
At the entrance he had a huge whale jaw set as the gateway to his house.  It's hard to imagine how large the whale must have been overall to have a jaw that size! 
It makes you want to read "Moby Dick" all over again!
 We also went inside the Scargo Tower.
 
There were beautiful views of Scrago Lake from the Tower and parking lot.
 
 When Terry and Des learned that Chris, Linda and I are sisters, they told us they had a surprise for us!  It turned out that there are three lighthouses called "The Three Sisters."  So of course we had to stop by and have our pictures taken -- the three sisters at the three sisters.
The big joke was that two of the lighthouses were "topless," so we were told we had to figure out which of the three of us were going to be associated with the topless lighthouses.
 We stopped for a picnic lunch along the ocean -- you can see the gathering clouds.
 And then we came to the tip of Cape Cod -- Provincetown!
 There were some beautiful historic buildings, like the Town Hall...
...and some colorful areas of town with interesting characters.  It was much more of a "party town" than we expected.  We tried to think of a place to compare it to.  We decided it made San Francisco look tame and was more like New Orleans during Mardi Gras.
 We did see the historic Pilgrim Monument.  This monument was founded in 1892 to commemorate the Pilgrims first landing in the New World here at Provincetown in November 1620.  This is also where they drew up and signed the Mayflower Compact, which established the new laws for the new land.  They spent five weeks here before sailing over to Plymouth.
 A walk along the wharf at Provincetown ended our day there. 
 We boarded the tour van for the drive back to Hyannis just as it started to rain.  The guides had arranged videos to play on the way back, depicting stories of this important area of American history. 
It was a fabulous day!

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