What’s better than talking about my weekend?  Talking about my vacation, of course.  Last week, I was blog-postless while enjoying some time on Cape Cod.  Not being a Massachusetts native myself, I don’t have stories of generations of family all vacationing on the Cape, but we’ve started our own tradition of occasional summer visits to Eastham.  People often compare the shape of the Cape to an arm making a fist.  Eastham is well along the arm, but south of the fist itself:

I would describe Eastham as offering just the right amount of nothing.  That is, there are several restaurants and a couple of motels, but when Kayla wanted to find a public spot with Wi-Fi access, she needed to bike to Orleans, the next town to the south.  What Eastham does offer is beaches along Cape Cod Bay, ocean beaches that are part of the National Seashore, and a few fresh-water kettle ponds.  Making it easy to go from one to the next are two great bike paths — the Cape Cod Rail Trail, and a path to Coast Guard Beach.  Could we need anything more to keep us busy?

We entertained a small but shifting cast of characters in a rental house for a week, and managed to take advantage of all the things that we consider attractions, in addition to the usual beaches.  We went to Wellfleet twice — once for the Wellfleet Drive-In, and once to walk through the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp at Marconi Beach.  (Marconi having sent the first trans-Atlantic radio transmission originating in the U.S.)

Americans usually learn that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, and Plymouth certainly played its important role in U.S. history.  But, in fact, the Pilgrims first landed at the tip of the Cape, near Provincetown.  Our week included two treks to Provincetown, where we mixed a bit of shopping with trips up the pier to drop one of our visitors at the ferry.

If you’re at Fletcher this fall (or a future one), you can easily experience a bit of Cape Cod with a day trip.  An hour’s drive will take you to Sandwich, where you can bike along the Cape Cod Canal.  Or perhaps you’d prefer to relax on the ferry to Provincetown.  If you bring a bicycle onto the ferry, it’s easy to get around Provincetown, though even traveling on foot allows you to cover a lot of territory.

My week’s vacation is behind me now and it took me all day yesterday to clear the email and other stuff that awaited me.  I’ll return the blog to admissions topics later this week.

The fact that I didn’t write about my weekend yesterday or on Monday may have had you breathing a sigh of relief.  Alas, I’m not giving up so easy on my favorite blog topic — I just didn’t have time to do it justice.  Even today, I’m only going to mention two activities that were a little different from my usual.  The first was a bike ride on Sunday morning to Torbert Macdonald Park in Medford.  As we were riding through the tall reeds by the side of the Mystic River, Paul said, “It’s like being in….”  I couldn’t hear the end of his sentence, but it doesn’t matter.  Whatever he may have said, the point is that riding along the park path is certainly not like being close to a major roadway across from an auto dealer.  Our ride took an hour and a quarter, including some diversions, but it could easily be done in an hour or less from campus.

On the opposite end of the activity spectrum (earning calories, rather than burning them), Kayla and I made a pilgrimage to Verna’s Donut Shop in North Cambridge.  The Boston area has a high donut to population ratio, this being traditional donut country, and Verna’s takes you back to kinder, gentler donut days.  Plus, Verna’s donuts are delicious.  After drinking our coffees and eating our donuts (one plain, one glazed), we headed for the door, but not before indulging in an additional purchase, a whoopie pie.

That neighborhood of North Cambridge — given the way Cambridge, Somerville, and Medford nest together — is only a mile from campus, and it’s loaded with great little restaurants.  Walk over to Verna’s for a donut, and pick a place for a future dinner, too.