Chatham Day 2: The Vacation within the Vacation

With a rare full night of rest, we woke on our second day in Chatham ready to fill it with as much of the Cape Cod experience that one could cram into a 24-hour period.  So the three of us jump into the car with Carolyn and begin our journey up to Provincetown, which is the northernmost point on the Cape.  We take a quick break during the hour-long drive to hop out of the car and check out the National Seashore.  This plot of land was set aside as a national park when Kennedy was president, and as a result, has avoided the commercial development that can be seen on the other parts of the Cape closer to Boston.  The Seashore is completely open, and its dunes sit in front of the ocean, making for a nice portrait.  Carolyn took us to some great locations where we could see the water on both the inside and outside of the Cape.  It seemed that we had great views of the beaches along the Cape everywhere we went.

From here, we continued our drive up to Provincetown, or P-Town as we often called it.  The day we arrived in Provincetown coincided with the Portuguese Heritage Festival, which had Provincetown decked out with celebratory flags, decorated boats, and a local parade.  We took in all of the culture and crowds as we walked along the main street and stopped into the local shops.  After walking along the pier, we stopped into The Squealing Pig for lunch.  From our table we were able to watch the local parade as we waited for our food.  After the parade, the three of us tried oyster shooters as well.  Although we had mixed reactions, I think we all agreed that oysters aren’t our favorite things to eat.

Before.

Eating.

During.

After.

After lunch, we got some fired dough, a Portuguese treat.  Given that the Portuguese Festival was going on, we felt compelled to pick some up, even though we were all stuffed.   We split two between the four of us and the dough was delicious.  Once we walked off some of the food, we headed back to the car to start our trip back to Chatham.  Jake, a lover of Putt-Putt golf, convinced all of us that we had to play a couple holes.  Jake proved to be a Tiger on the course, as Brad, Carolyn, and myself struggled to find our golf game.  We all had multiple shots that found water or bounced all the way back to land behind where we initially teed off, which provided us with some hearty laughs.  As we neared the competition of the course, and the battle for second place was heating up, a storm began to roll into town.  The wind picked up and we rushed to complete the 18^th hole before the storm cloud was directly overhead.  Brad sunk his last putt as the first drops hit our shirts and we hurried to the car.

The Storm is Coming!

Once were back home, we brought out the board games and got ready for some more friendly competition before the night is over.  After a hard fought game of Sorry, we decided to play the friendly atmosphere destroyer, Monopoly.  Luckily, the board was never flipped even though there were plenty of heated discussions over trades and strategies to try to take down Jake, who developed into the Rockefeller of the Monopoly board.  Unfortunately, he was too big to fail, and Brad and I conceded all we were worth to end the game fairly quickly, at least by Monopoly standards.  The end of the game coincided with the end of our second day in Chatham and we headed to bed for another full night of sleep.

Us with the Boats in P-Town.