6/15-16/13: Saturday and Sunday, June 15 and 16: Cape Cod, Wow! Saturday was a gorgeous, clear, brilliantly sunny day on Cape Cod, and I was feeling up to sightseeing. It was so beautiful! After a visit to the Salt Pond Visitor Center for the Cape Cod National Seashore, I went to Wellfleet to Mac's Shack, one of Lisa's recommendations, for a Caesar salad with lobster -- my first taste of real, Atlantic lobster. After I ate one of the anchovies, I picked the others off, and the rest of the salad was very good. But I'll never knock myself out to get lobster.
   Then I walked to Mac's Market -- yes, a related business -- for ice cream, which I ate while walking out onto the pier and then the beach. After that, I walked along the bayside road and ventured onto the sand to see some real horseshoe crabs. Or ex-horseshoe crabs: they were, alas, dead. They're much bigger than I had thought, and just as strange as I'd imagined (what DO they think of us?!). The roads were lined with charming homes that made me want to sign on the dotted line.
   Then I was off for Provincetown at last, stopping to take in Race Point and dip my finger into the real, live Atlantic. I had to make three circles of the relevant part of U.S. Highway 6 to get a photo of the "End of the highway" sign going into Provincetown. I thought I'd see Provincetown by visiting a grocery store, and the GPS unit took me down a street so narrow there was parking -- barely -- on one side only. The street was also full of people, who must assume, rightly, that only a fool or a tourist would venture down there in a vehicle, especially a van. For a while, I thought I WAS going to encounter the mob of incensed Easterners chanting, "California, go home!!" The grocery store was closed.
   Lots of charming buildings, but I was definitely out of place. The van needed Spanx* in order to get around in Provincetown, so I extracted myself and then, on the way out of town, found a real, accessible supermarket and got my shopping done, hooray!
   Finally leaving Provincetown altogether, I had to stop and photograph the "Bishop, CA 3205 Miles" sign (only took me two go-rounds for that one). Then, on the way back to Eastham, I stopped at the Marconi Site, where Guliegmo Marconi built his wireless telegraphy station to send the first wireless telegraph to England, in then-president Theodore Roosevelt's name. King Edward promptly replied! It was a triumph! Time, erosion, and deliberate demolition have erased most traces of the construction, alas.
   While I was there, I admired anew the rugosa roses that grow on the cape in such profusion, mostly ones with single, magenta-pink flowers, like Hansa, but also ones with single, white flowers, like Snowy Owl. The harsh environment keeps them very low-growing, but they sport the usual, enormous, cherry-tomato-sized hips. And the blossoms are very fragrant.
   I stopped at Catch of the Day for a takeout order of seafood cakes and a small Caesar salad for an evening meal (sorry, Medifast!), tootled back to the motel, and ta da! Stretched out in the chair I'd been wanting to try, as I munched and read.
   I had expected Cape Cod to be something on the order of the Peninsula in Long Beach which separates the ocean from Alamitos Bay. It's a -- to my childhood senses -- long, thin sandspit barely wide enough for a few homes on each side of its main street. But Cape Cod is ENORMOUS, a world in itself, and so forested at its southern end that I couldn't see the ocean or the bay at all! It's all created by the glaciers of the last ice age, principally as moraines, and is covered with those kettle ponds that are left when great lumps of ice melt in place and leave holes below the waterline. If you want to see kettles in California, you need to see the High Sierra. Tioga Road passes lots of them in Dana Meadows, although they are much smaller than Cape Cod's kettle ponds.
   Sunday, it was sunny and lovely again, and I hated to leave beautiful Cape Cod, especially for the west. My "eastward-ing" is done: now I am sad for it, for I don't know if I'll ever see it again, and it has been so lovely.
   And also it grew increasingly overcast as I forged west across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut -- oddly, no markers at the states' borders which I could see. I'm now in the West Hartford Inn in West Hartford, CT, to see the cousins. It's a hotel, they have only underground parking, and I'm on the fourth floor. I wish I were somewhere else!
   When I took my shoes off in the hotel room today, I found Cape Cod sand in them!
*All Spanx need are garters to be real, old-fashioned panty girdles.