Cape Cod

Today was our last full day at Pinewood Lodge Campground outside Plymouth, Mass.  We decided to spend the day on Cape Cod. We knew we wouldn't have time to see the entire Cape, so we stopped at the Salt Pond Visitor Center to ask a Park Ranger to point out the highlights.

At the Visitor Center, we did take some time out to walk around the salt marsh and see the ocean.  From there, we went to see the Nauset Light.

We stopped at the site of the old Marconi Station, which was the site of the first transatlantic wireless telegraph station.

Then we went from the ocean across the Cape to the bay side.  Duck Harbor Beach is a beautiful natural beach out on a peninsula known as Great Island, west of the town of Wellfleet. We ate our picnic lunch near the dunes. It was hard to believe we were in the middle of such a big tourist attraction.  We only saw four other people while we were on the beach.

This is the Cape Code Light:

It almost fell into the ocean. The folks in the town of Truro came together to save the light.  They had to move it back 450 feet. In the Visitor Center, we watched a really cool video of the process of moving the light.

The big tourist draw in Provincetown, at the end of the Cape, is the Pilgrim Monument. The climb to the top was slow and steady. Once we got to the top, Dave took this photo looking down the stairwell as it wrapped around the inside walls of the monument. Just thinking about looking over the railing made Kathy's knees weak!

There is a lot to do on the Cape. We only managed to see some of the highlights.  We were afraid it would be very built up and commercial, like the Jersey Shore.  We found the National Seashore area of the Cape to be very wide open. There wasn't as much development as we thought there would be.  However, the town of Provincetown is very old and the streets narrow, but we still managed to get the truck in and out with only one wrong turn requiring the tightest three-point turn ever!