August 4, 2013

I was the first person up this morning and after the rest of the family was up, we hit the road at 8:15 for an hours drive to Providence, RI.  We stopped in to the Capitol which has been one of the prettiest we've seen so far.  Next we headed over to park on the water front where we hit the Providence flea which happens every Sunday.  We walked through but didn't find anything we had to have.  We walked up the hill to Main Street and followed the green line trail through the city to the Roger Williams Memorial.  The green line is literally a green line of paint that goes through the downtown area and passes 30 or so historical buildings and locations.  We didn't follow it completely but we did see some cool old buildings and interesting architecture.  After we completed the junior ranger program at Roger Williams, we walked back to the camper drive back into Massachusetts to New Bedford.

I made lunch while Scott drive us the 45 or so minutes to New Bedford.  We sat in the camper and had a nice lunch laughing and talking.  New Bedford was the whaling capitol of the world back in the 1800's and is famously depicted in Moby Dick (although I must confess I have never read it).  The historic district is contained within the National Park property.  It still has cobblestone streets and most of the buildings are well preserved.  We again did the junior ranger program, walking all of the area to do the scavenger hunt and explored the whaling museum.  Everyone was tired of walking and we all looked forward to our next stop on the beach at Cape Cod.

Cape Cod was about a two hour drive with traffic.  Lorelei took a nap and I made Luke have FOB time  with no video games for an hour, which he would say nearly killed him.  We arrived at the visitor center around 4 o'clock.  This was about 2 hours later than I had originally planned and really left no time for the junior ranger program because the visitor center closed at 5.  The ranger told us we could go sit through the hour long ranger talk at 5 o'clock at the Nauset Lighthouse but when we told him that we were in a camper he said we would never even get in the parking lot because all of the beach areas were full.  We decided to watch the park movie about how glaciers formed the cape.  Usually a park movie will count as a ranger led program (at least in the 59 others that we have done) but this ranger said it didn't.  We told Lorelei if she did every other activity in the book researching the stuff she couldn't answer online, we would just mail it in and say we didn't have time for the ranger talk.  We'll see.  Scott and I weren't very impressed with this guy so we decided after the movie to try our luck at the closest beach parking lot anyway.  Luckily, we got there and managed to park the FunV in a spot that was just for us (technically it wasn't a spot but we made one anyway).  We gave Lorelei the option of going to the beach or doing the ranger thing and she picked the beach.  Smart girl.

The water was 61 degrees.  Cold!!!  But our crazy kids went out and jumped the waves anyway.  Knee deep was as far as I got.  At NC and SC beaches you are very likely to find a layer of shells that hurt to walk over right where the waves crash.  On Cape Cod, the shells are replaced by rocks, and they hurt.  As we were watching the kids play, I noticed something in the water which Scott tried to tell me was a shark.  "They filmed Jaws here you know" was what I got from him.  Turns out, it was harbor seals swimming about 200 yards off the shore.  They were so close.  They swam out there back and forth in the area for well over an hour while the kids and others played in the surf.  We have never seen anything like that down south and when we saw seals in California, they had taken over the entire beach and you couldn't even get in the water.  That was by far the best part of Cape Cod.  After a rinse in the cold showers at the restrooms, we headed back to the camper for a change of clothes and walked over to take a picture of the lighthouse.  There was a line to climb it.  Scott asked if we wanted to but once you have climbed NC lighthouses and the Statue of Liberty, a 3 story one is small potatoes.  I made dinner while we drove off the Cape and into Plymouth so we could stop at Pilgrim's Park and see the rock with 1620 inscribed on it.  Really cool to know that's where they came in but the fact that the rock was in a cage with a building around it somehow made it seem fake or cheap.  But we had a really pretty sunset and then we went back to the campground for showers and bed time.

Personal notes about the area.  There are trees everywhere, which I love.  But somehow they seem oppressive; in the mountains of NC or along the coast, there are breaks in the trees that provide views.  Here there are no breaks, just endless stretches of trees.  Should be interesting to head into Maine and New Hampshire since the trees are supposed to be really thick there.  Tomorrow we are riding the train into Boston.