Provincetown "42:02.4N 70:11.1W"

VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Tue 28 Jun 2011 04:21
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.