New England Trip (day 3)

We got up Sunday morning and decided we wanted to drive to the very tip of Cape Cod. We drove to Race Point Beach and saw a lighthouse:

 I was really hoping we'd find a lighthouse that we could climb to the top, but no such luck. We just saw a few from a distance.

The beach was windy and a little cool but perfectly gorgeous. Olive liked the wind in her face:

 And she liked eating sand:

There was a tall tower that you could see from all the beaches, I looked it up and it turned out to be the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown. Did you know the Pilgrims actually landed in Provincetown first? They spent about 5 weeks there and then decided to head across the bay to Plymouth. I had no idea!

We bought tickets to climb the tower (finished in 1910) and tour the little museum, and we were pleasantly surprised.

 It's 252 feet tall, so up, up we went:

 The view from the top was beautiful. In this picture you can see the very, very, very tip of Massachusetts, that little strip of land that's curving towards you:

 Olive and me back at the bottom:

The museum was small and very eclectic and a little weird, but still interesting. It had a section on whaling, and a big section on Arctic exploration because some big explorer was from Provincetown, and then a very few items of Pilgrim history.  But we spent the next hour in the car reading wikipedia articles about the Pilgrims and early settlements in the area.

Also an important fact about Provincetown: it's a huge LGBT vacation destination. Little did we know. We were definitely in the straight minority; the whole thing was very bizarre.

We had thought about taking the ferry to Martha's Vineyard but decided we'd seen enough of Cape Cod and it was time to move on to the next thing. I had this mentality that there wasn't a big chance we'd ever be back in this area, so I wanted to see as much of New England as we could!

We left Provincetown and got back on the main road for a bit, trying to figure out what to do next.  Right outside of the town was a roadside shack selling seafood so we pulled over for lunch. I think it was one of my favorite meals of the trip! Dan laughed at me for always taking pictures of our food, but here was our fish and chips and lobster cake sandwich. My goodness, it was delicious:

After lunch we drove in the general direction of Rhode Island where Dan's second meeting was going to be on Monday morning. After reading all about Pilgrims, Dan said he wanted to stop back in Plymouth and see Plymouth Rock. The nice thing about the East Coast is everything is so close! It was hardly a detour at all to go back to Plymouth. But on the way there we started reading more about Plymouth Rock only to learn that there really is no such thing. Olive was asleep and I didn't want to wake her up, so I stayed in the car while Dan ran out to take a picture of "Plymouth rock":

 Talk about anti-climatic. And stopping the car made Olive wake up after all and she cried for a good hour.

We were running out of daylight but wanted to see some of the Newport mansions. This was kind of at the bottom of my list of things to do, but it turned out to be pretty incredible. We spent a half an hour on the Cliff Walk trail. On one side was a drop off to the ocean (with this amazing full moon, iPhone cameras cannot do it justice)

 and on the other side were the "summer cottages":

These houses were unreal. We wanted to see more but Olive was tired so we headed to our last hotel. We got crappy Chinese food and ate it in the room, Dan worked on everything he needed for his meeting, I spent over an hour trying to get Olive to sleep, and then gave up and slept (or tried to) with her in our bed all night. It was the only night she didn't sleep well and I'm glad it was at the end of our trip!