It's 62 degrees this morning with a nice blue sky. We enjoy Mom's homemade sourdough bread with Anita & Kevin's peach jam. After breakfast we go to church with Mom. Interesting service with lots of singing, though the pastor is out of town. We meet Mom's friends Linda and Mid there.
After lunch, we finish packing and head to Gwynne's. Beth rides with Mom and Greg follows in the Trek. Gwynne's place looks great. The pool is closed and outdoor furniture stored, but some of the summer flowers are still blooming. We visit and chat and enjoy Sante Fe Chili for dinner - with ice cream, of course. We plan on leaving by 6 AM tomorrow, so call it an early night.
Monday, October 14
58 degrees as we pack up and hit the road. We follow Gwynne to the PA Turnpike and then she drops back to follow us and our leisurely pace. Our gas mileage drops horribly when we go over 63mph, so we get passed a lot - haha!
Traffic is moving pretty well as we enter the NJ Turnpike and go north, across the George Washington Bridge with minimum slow downs.
We make a few pit/gas stops and then pause at a scenic overlook in Connecticut. The view is of Mystic. And then we cross the bridge over the canal that separates Cape Cod from the mainland.
We arrive at Shore Way Acres Inn in Falmouth around 1:00 but the rooms are not ready yet, so we walk into town to find some lunch.
Divine Pizza sounds good. Mom and Beth share some hand-tossed pizza while Greg and Gwynne have sandwiches and soup.
When we return, the rooms are just being released, so we unpack. We are both on the first floor of "the Pool House" which has a nice indoor pool as well as a nice dining room and meeting areas. The hotel is the oldest Family-owned Inn on Cape Cod. It began with one building and gradually added other surrounding homes as they became available. Old, but in pretty good shape and the staff is very friendly.
We meet Gayle Felix, our Road Scholar Group Leader who is from North Reading, MA - coincidentally the same town we will head to after this program to visit Greg's brother! There are 16 folks signed up with this 4-day program which is titled: Cape Cod and Woods Hole Oceanography and Natural History.
The group meets and walks to La Cucina Sui Mare for a welcome dinner. Great salmon with artichokes and asparagus and salad.
He talks about the geography of Cape Cod, which is technically a peninsula but can be sailed totally around since a canal was built in 1914. The cape is shaped like a flexed arm muscle with Provincetown at the curled fingertips,
Chatham at the outer elbow and Falmouth, where we are, in the armpit! The cape is a product of an Ice Age glacier and has over 300 ponds and lakes. Wind and water continue to shape the land, eroding some beaches and building others. Lighthouses often had to be moved as land eroded.
Native people have been here for at least 8,000 years and by the 1500's Europeans were visiting, mainly for fishing. Plymouth Colony will be celebrating its 400th anniversary in 2020. Cape Cod is tied to the ocean, with fishing, whaling, shipping, research and recreation prominent at different times. Both lighthouses (13 at one time) and shipwrecks (over 3,000) litter the area.
Early on salt hay was a popular crop, today cranberries are still grown in some areas. The railroad began to bring tourists in the late 1800's and the National Seashore was created in 1960, preserving 38-40,000 acres. 230,000 people live on Cape Cod but the population swells in Summer.
Great introduction! The other people in the program are from Florida, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and New York. All have done at least one other Road Scholar Program. One other couple is driving a PleasureWay RV - very similar to our Roadtrek.
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