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dougsmith51

Cape Cod, Boston, and Vermont

NOTE: We did a lot in the past two weeks, so this blog entry is longer than some others. Our apologies, but we didn't want to leave anything out!


Leaving Newport behind, we moved on to Cape Cod. Jeannette had never visited, and Doug had not been there since his business school days in the 1970s. We stayed in a campground in Brewster, about halfway along the Cape, a good central location.

While we were there, the weather was mostly cold (highs in the low 50s) and windy. We tolerated the cold and winds to avoid dealing with the summer crowds and traffic, which we were told can be quite bad. In addition to exploring the Cape, we also traveled to the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, neither of which we'd been to before.


The day of our arrival, we took a ride on part of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, which wound alongside ponds and through forests that were sporting new spring foliage.


The next day we took the ferry from Falmouth to Martha's Vineyard The island is the closer, larger, and more populous of the two islands south of Cape Cod. Its population of 18,000 swells to 200,000 in the summer!


We left the Fittata on the Cape and traveled as foot passengers on the ferry. When we arrived, we rented a car and began our exploration of the island.


Our first stop was at the town of Oak Bluffs, which initially was a religious camp meeting site, with its meeting hall in the town still playing host to many summer events.

Early campgoers stayed in tents for the summer, but later more and more people put down roots and built small Victorian cottages, made to resemble the camp tents they had lived in. The home were painted in "candy colors," a practice that continues to this day. The elaborate woodwork decorations owed their existence to the then-recent invention of the jig saw - obviously, the designers liked to experiment with over-the-top designs.


If you look closely, you can see painted scenes from the Wizard of Oz just below the top railing.

We drove to Edgartown, where some of the one-percenters vacation in the summer, but just stopped to see the local lighthouse.


We also stopped inland at Island Alpaca, a local alpaca farm. Many of their animals had won competitions for their fine wool.

The alpacas had their annual shearing the previous week, now sporting very large heads and scrawny bodies!


Traveling around the island to the west end, we visited the Gay Head lighthouse and the beautiful and colorful chalk cliffs nearby.


The lighthouse was moved in the 1990s away from the crumbling edge of the cliffs.

After a great seafood dinner in Oak Bluffs on the water, we caught the last ferry back to Cape Cod.


The next day we biked the northern portion of the Cape Cod Rail Trail, taking it to its end about halfway up what we thought of as the "forearm" of Cape Cod.


As the day wound down, we visited Nickerson State Park near our campground which has a number of lakes formed by glaciers during the last ice age.

We hiked around Little Cliff Pond, which sits right next to Big Cliff Pond even through the two are not connected by any streams.


The following day, we explored Cape Cod National Seashore. We hiked the very interesting Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail, which transitioned from stunted pines near the ocean to a swamp teeming with moss, fungi, cedars, and red maples.

We also visited one of the many lighthouses on the Cape - this one even had a golf course surrounding it although no one was playing in the 45 mile-per-hour wind. Unlike a miniature golf course, you did not need to putt underneath the lighthouse to reach the hole.


Finally, we visited the Province Lands area of the National Seashore at the far end of the Cape. From the NPS Visitor Center, you can see the progressions of dunes, going from tree covered to bare dunes by the ocean.

We walked down to the ocean, where Jeannette clearly enjoyed the almost-tropical breezes.

After seeing this sign, we decided not to bathe our toes in the surf.

We ate a delicious seafood dinner in Provincetown before returning to our campground.


On our final day in the area, we visited the island of Nantucket, taking the fast ferry from Hyannis. We brought our bikes with us on the ferry, as we were planned to do a circuit of the island.


Although the winds of the previous days had died down, we were in and out of fog during the day, increasing the island's mystique. While Martha's Vineyard feels like a tourist destination, Nantucket still has a 19th century vibe, reminiscent of its time as the whaling capital of America.

The only town on the island still has cobblestone streets.

After lunch at a restaurant in town, we spent the rest of the time on our bike tour, which took us on streets, bike paths, and sandy trails past dunes, beaches, lighthouses, and homes with well-weathered wooden siding. Seeing all the fog-veiled scenery, Jeannette felt like she was biking through an Andrew Wyeth painting.

We caught the 6:15 pm ferry (last of the day) back to Cape Cod, and ate dinner at a seafood restaurant in Hyannis.


Next, it was on to the Boston area for a few days. The sun finally came out, and the temperature was instantly about 20 degrees warmer! We've been to Boston a number of times (and Doug lived there for two years in graduate school) so we spent most of our visit doing things outside of the city.


Based on recommendations from a business school friend of Doug's who'd lived in the area, we traveled to the North Shore and visited the historic town of Marblehead, settled in the early 1600s.

The town hall, which sits on a hill in the highest part of Marblehead, is home to a famous painting (see below), the Spirit of 76. Unfortunately, the hall was closed on the weekend so we were not able to see the painting in person.

The Marblehead museum was hosting a spring garden event.

Many of the buildings in the historic part of town are labeled with dates of construction and who lived there.

While the homes of shoe makers, sail wrights and other merchants were identified, there were also homes of residents who played key roles in Colonial America. One resident had even been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, Massachusetts Governor and Vice President of the United States.

We took a self-guided walking tour through the town, admiring the buildings and the rocky shoreline of the harbor with some 2,000 moonings that are probably well used in the summer months. We visited the historic burial yard where several hundred people who fought in the Revolutionary War were buried, and also visited a Revolutionary-era fort.



Another day, we traveled to the town of Needham and visited with another business school friend of Doug's, Reg Foster and his wife Barbie. Their sprawling house is over 100 years old and their 8 acres includes beautiful plantings and gardens they've reclaimed from decades of neglect from previous owners.


After visiting the Fosters, we headed over to Walden Pond (now a Massachusetts state reservation) and walked around the perimeter of the lake. In addition to some kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders, we saw a couple of people swimming the length of the lake.

Along our walk, we visited the site of the cabin where Henry David Thoreau lived for over two years before writing Walden, or Life in the Woods.

Many visitors had built rock cairns or left other mementos.


On our final full day in the Boston area, we did travel into the city so we could bike the well-used paths that traverse both sides of the Charles River through Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown.


From the Cambridge side of the river, we had great views of Boston's downtown.

We also made a little side trip to Boston's Public Garden, where we sat under the trees and watched the famous pedal-driven swan boats navigate the lake.

We also visited the sculpture that is an homage to the children's classic Make Way for Ducklings which is set in the Public Garden. Visitors had decked out the mama duck and ducklings for spring.


Leaving the Boston area, we traveled up toward Burlington, VT to visit friends from Virginia, Tim and Anne Hunt, who had recently purchased a second home in the area. It's in a beautiful setting in the Green Mountains, overlooking scenic Lake Iroquois.

We spent several days visiting with Tim and Anne, as well as their son Colin (who grew up with our oldest Tory), his wife Kim, and their new baby Ophelia, all of whom live just a couple miles away.


We visited Lake Iroquois, which is managed by three Vermont towns, and hiked one of the trails there. There were carpets of newly-blooming trillium.


The next day it was quite rainy, so Anne drove us up to the little town of Bristol, where we ate lunch and spent time poking around in the local bookshop, Recycled Reading of Vermont.

By the evening, the rain had stopped and the mountains were misty.

Tim had bought himself a new Traeger smoker grill for Father's Day, and Jeannette, tool girl that she is, helped him assemble it.

Our final day in Vermont was warm and sunny, and we rode a rail trail that starts in Burlington, goes along Lake Champlain, and follows a causeway out into the middle of the lake.



We left our friends and Vermont and undertook a long drive to reach Bar Harbor, ME and Acadia National Park. More about Maine in our next blog post!


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