Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard - June 2015

It was just time for another getaway - this time a bus trip east...to the very eastern U.S., Cape Cod.  The day we arrived at our digs, the Riviera Beach Resort, it was just plain cold.  The sea breeze was nippy and the beach didn't look all that inviting, not with a water temp in the 50's.  But then this is the shoulder season on the Cape and chilly weather was not unexpected.

 
The first day was spent in the Provincetown area, and the anticipated whale watch cruise was on the agenda.  The wind and rain and waves gave me pause, so I enjoyed shopping, checking out the library housed in a very big historic church, people watching and enjoying a masalada from the Portuguese Bakery while Jim set off into the Atlantic in search of whales.




He was greatly rewarded with sightings of over 20 humpback and pilot whales.  The sea was rough, but it didn't bother him.  Getting a good photo was difficult, but here is one.

 The next morning we headed for Hyannis. (No, you can't get close to the Kennedy Compound.)  We stopped at the JFK Memorial and then traveled historic Route 6A to Sandwich where we ate lunch at the Daniel Webster Inn and walked through the town.  

A walk through the Great Salt Marsh was a highlight. The plank trail led to a beach and then water.

The blue boxes in the marsh were there to attract the pesky Greenhead flies who lay their eggs in the salt marsh and are a real pest on the Cape.  First of all, they are persistent and they bite...like their cousins, the horsefly and deerfly...and they have large, iridescent green eyes.  The height of their season is July and August and sometimes beaches post warnings about them.  They are resistant to insecticides, so these boxes are placed with a pheromone that attracts the flies and traps them, hopefully before leaving their eggs.

A highlight for me was visiting the Plymouth Pilgrim sites - not the rock which is mythical anyway - but, despite huffing and puffing, the trek up 94 steps to the old Pilgrim burying ground was well worth it.  It was permeated with a sense of history and was almost ghost like on the top of the hill (also the site of their first fort prior to the cemetery). 

It was also pretty exciting to see this sign on one of the houses on the way up the hill.  A reference to one of my direct Doty ancestors!

To be continued...

(This post originally appeared on my former blog, A Face to the Sun, on June 25, 2015.)