This year, we replaced our annual end of December trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, with a shorter version to Cape Cod. With the Tuesday holiday and a Monday workday for New Year’s Eve, we only had a few days for a short getaway. Our uncle and aunt were kind enough to host us at their home in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
We explored Falmouth on foot and bike, but the highlight was a day trip to the Cape Cod National Seashore and to Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. Henry David Thoreau, one of my favorite authors, famously said, “A man may stand there and put all of America behind him.”
We stopped at the visitors center in Eastham and did a hike on the Nauset Marsh Trail with the kids, which took us around the salt marshes and through some beautiful woods. We saw a majestic Great Blue Heron on his perch, and explored the history of the area, which included Viking history and Native American history.
We wound our way up Route 6 to Provincetown, where we had lunch at Far Land Provisions. We walked around town, checking out the Pilgrim Monument, which was closed for the season, and checked out the beach. We had fun walking through the eclectic town before heading southwest in our cars again.
We went through the center of Wellfleet and over to the Great Island Trail. We walked along The Gut and over the dunes to the beach on bay side. We came across a duck skull, checked out an old shanty, which the kids enjoyed; and made it back to the cars just before the skies opened up. Heading west on Saturday afternoon, we drove smack into a wicked winter storm that dumped more than a foot of snow in Connecticut. On the Cape, we had heavy rain for several hours on the Cape, before switching to heavy wet snow.
Three inches of the thick white stuff coated everything in Falmouth when we awoke this morning. It made for a wet, slushy, slippery, crunchy, and cold mountain bike ride on the Shining Sea Bikeway which we took over to Woods Hole and back. The storm was the second this week and smaller of the two, so we were bummed to not be in northern New Hampshire, but we still had a blast on the beautiful Cape.
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