Provincetown "42:02.4N 70:11.1W"
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Tue 28 Jun 2011 04:21
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We are now anchored in the bay at Provincetown at
the northern tip of Cape Cod (named by that Gosnold fellow in 1602). This is
where the Mayflower arrived in 1620 after an arduous trip from Plymouth - they
were aiming for the Hudson River (where New York now stands) but ended up here.
They stayed for three weeks then decided to move across the bay to an abandoned
Indian settlement where they founded the new Plymouth (the Indian settlement was
abandoned because the New England Indians had been nearly wiped out by plague
(almost certainly contracted from Europeans) just before the Mayflower
arrived.
Here are a couple of views of the Pilgrims'
Monument which domintes the skyline; everything in the US has to be the biggest
or best in some way or other, in this case, struggling for a really worthwhile
superlative, it's "the tallest granite structure in the USA".
Hurrah! The tower is modelled on one in
Sienna which we have also climbed.
  And we've been cycling in the Cape Cod National
Seashore, a vast expanse of coast, dunes, forest and saltmarsh now run by the US
National Park Service after being saved for the nation by President Kennedy who
loved Cape Cod. Here I am on the beautifully
presented cycle path in the dunes. In the more thickly vegetated sections there
are lots of chipmunks which look really comical running around; I'm not used to
seeing them out of cages.
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