Another lovely day here in Paradise: we are soooooo lucky! We had a relaxing morning enjoying the sunshine on the beautiful white sandy beach at South Cape Beach, a State Park. We're not sure if there was no Ranger there because of the USA Government budget problems or whether now that we are in October and therefore out-of-season the State Park is not manned. We had heard that State Park Offices would be closed because of the Government's inability to agree a budget and thus pay staff wages. There may have been trail leaflets available if a Ranger had been there but really it made little difference to our visit. We did note the usual American 'Welcome' of a welcome sign underpinned by a long list of what is forbidden, but that too didn't detract from our visit. It was an amazingly hot day, very hard to believe that we are in October: we understand that this is not typical October weather, an 'Indian Summer' but just perfect for laying on the beach.

After a late lunch, laying in the sun doesn't use many calories, we dragged ourselves off the beach to walk the trail that runs from the parking lot through scrub oak/pitch pine woodland to a sandy path between the sand dunes and the salt marsh and "kettle" ponds to Waquoit Point. We had some tantalising glimpses of some interesting birds. There was a large hawk (that we couldn't identify but think it wasn't an Osprey) that we had a good but fleeting view of as it flew past and some long distance sightings of tall white, heron-like birds that we guess must have been Egrets. You'll see a white blob in Jill's photo of the marsh/kettle pond area - that's a long-distance Egret!

We walked the return leg along the beach, which for the mile or so from the point we had totally to ourselves. Even by the parking lot there were only very few people sitting on the beach. And once past that we again had the beach virtually to ourselves. There was the odd washed-up horseshoe crab but not such an interesting beach-combing walk as earlier in the week.

As with other trails we've walked in Cape Cod this one had warnings about deer ticks, but unusually it also had warnings of a small but deadly jelly fish - we happily didn't encounter either! We learnt yesterday whilst on Nantucket that Lyme Disease from deer tick bites is so prevalent that Nantucket residents at least, we don't know for sure if the same applies to Cape Cod residents, are not allowed to be blood donors, so a serious threat.

And back to base to cook tea. As with a few of our house swap homes we don't think that our host can do much proper cooking: it's sometimes a challenge to find the right utensil or pan. You might have thought that a beef stir fry would be easy enough to manage but Jill tried and discarded 6 knives before finding one that would slice the beef - blunt knives really are the sign of a kitchen unused for cooking.