After Rhode Island we drove to Cape Cod. This picture, and the next few that follow are from somewhere in the vicinity of Wellfleet, along the Atlantic Ocean side of the cape. These are of course, very large dunes. They sort of lack perspective in this picture, so just take our word for it until you scroll down to the next one.

The footprints you see in these photos are mostly ours. The tire tracks are someone else's. We don't know who made them but they were nowhere to be seen while we were around. We parked somewhere on top the dunes and sort of slid down a pathway to get to the beach. Going back up to the car turned out to be much more work. Incidentally, Melanie is here in this picture providing some scale. Although really with this camera angle she's mostly providing scale to the ocean. Let's move things around a bit, shall we?

There we go. Now we have Melanie in the middle of the dune, and you can sort of roughly estimate that this particular dune is over 14 Melanies high. Wow. Also in case you're wondering what's holding her up there -- it's velcro. No, not really. We should mention that this is not what most of the cape looks like. This is what most of the northern part of the cape facing the ocean directly along the coast looks like. Much of the rest of it looks like cute little bed and breakfasts interspersed with antique shops and donut stores.

Now here we are on the west side of the cape with Cape Cod Bay in the background. These dunes aren't quite as high and the sand has an altogether different quality. Right about the time we were sitting here looking out over all the nothing around us, we were discussing just how hopeless a place this would have been for the pilgrims to land. Of course, this is where they landed first and unfortunately they missed hundreds of B and Bs and seafood restaurants by just 15 miles or so. Instead, they found this rather unfriendly, desolate landscape without the slightest sign of fresh drinking water. (Ignore the bottle next to Melanie's knee please). So, being the intrepid pilgrims they were, they continued on to Plymouth. We followed them, with an overnight stop in Hyannis to have a nice dinner.

And look! Here they are. Well, here's their boat. Actually, here is a replica of their boat, the Mayflower. You'll have to imagine that there weren't 400 other boats in the harbor when they arrived of course. We actually didn't spend long here, but we did stop to see that necessary bit of Americana - the Plymouth Rock. We didn't take a picture because it was so incredibly dull. Imagine if you will, a rock, about the size of a flattened compact car with the number 1 6 2 0 engraved into it, and a large crack down one side. That's pretty much it. Plus we learned that the pilgrims didn't even engrave it. It wasn't done until a couple centuries later when someone 'thought' they found the rock where the pilgrims landed and someone else decided to make a monument. Later when they decided to move the monument closer to the water they broke it. (The rock not the water.) So they just cemented it back together. How romantic. If you're ever in Plymouth, and you stop to see the rock (which is nearly mandatory) we recommend you then proceed a quarter mile north along the water to Ocean Spray Cranberry World which is altogether much more interesting, more thirst quenching, a wee bit tarter and has more historic documents. (All of which pertain to 18th century cranberry harvesting).