Day 82: Friends in Far Places

The best part of our day was reuniting with the Israel family! We last saw Mark and the kids (Sondra and her trombone were on tour) in the middle of Ohio, where they were preparing for their year on the road. It's such a strange thing to have faces from home in a setting that's so new to us...Cape Cod.
We met on the wharf in Provincetown, where we were scheduled to take a "Critter Cruise" in the harbor, the second-largest natural harbor in the world (the largest is in Le Havre, France). The eight of us clambored aboard the Viking Princess, and Peter, our teacher for the next 90 minutes, had us help to drag in several types of nets, skimmers and even a lobster trap and study what critters we'd caught. Most were very small...plankton, tiny shrimp and sea worms, clams. We studied lobster and crab, learning how to determine male and female, and even seeing thousands of eggs inside a spider crab. The kids' most memorable part was seeing the lobster trap baited with a nasty thing that used to be a blue fish. Truly disgusting.

We found the history of the harbor to be wonderful. It's where the Mayflower first anchored, and where the Mayflower Compact was written and signed--the first document of self-government in the New World. Two small sand hills (perhaps rising three feet off the beach) are known locally as Fort Ridiculous and Fort Useless; they were cannon mounts during the Civil War, put in place by the Union army in case the Confederates made an attack on the harbor. As indicated by the nicknames, the cannons were never used. Makes for a good story, though!

Much of the northern half of the cape makes up the Cape Cod National Seashore. We paid a brief visit to one of two national park visitor centers, long enough to pick up the girls' junior ranger books and view a great film about the seashore's constant change of shape and size with the shifting of sand. We look forward to heading back out to the Cape early next week, after the Labor Day crowds have thinned, and explore this amazing landscape of dunes, bluffs, pine forests and bogs. It's such a serene scene, one that makes it difficult to believe that more than 3,000 ships lie in the waters off its eastern coast, victims to the sandbars and treacherous reefs. One of them, the Whyda, was a pirate ship sunk in a storm in 1717. The ship and its trove of gold, silver and cannon was found in 1984 by a Provincetown treasure hunter. His find was turned into a fantastic, touring exhibit that made a stop at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science last spring. It's fun to have been to the exhibit and now stand so near to where the ship was found. Two more of its cannon were recovered just a couple of weeks ago and now sit on the wharf, under a constant sprinkle of sea water in an effort to preserve them.

Our time with the Israels ended with a delicious dinner at Provincetown's famous Lobster Pot. (Can you guess what we ate? Our obsession: lobster rolls!) We'll connect with Mark and Sondra for a couple more days of fun before we go in opposite directions...Connecticut for us, Maine for them.