And so to the final stage of our trip, a couple of days on Cape Cod. So many of the places we have visited or passed through appear well known to us through their assocatios with the Kennedys, Kennebunkport on the drive from Boston to Maine, Jackie K came from Newport where they married and they also had a house on Cape Cod at Hyannis, although for the most part we have avoided the most touristy areas if possible.

The Cape is a long sandy spit less than 2 miles wide at most and suffers from constant erosion, losing 10 feet of shore each year and if you believe in global warning and want to visit you need to do it within the next couple of hundred years or  it will be gone. We went for a 4WD ride in the sand dunes which provided desert scenes for some films before it was made a protected area by JFK and planted with grass. We have walked through woods, around peaceful salt marshes and by cranberry bogs,  come Xmas we will remember where the cranberries came from. 

Cape Cod is where the pilgrims first landed before moving  on to Plymouth, where we stopped on the last day's drive back to Boston. At each place there is a lot tourism, coachloads of schoolkids visit a replica of the Mayflower 2, we gave that a miss, but it was quite nice to be in these historical places, even if we cynically regarded it as unlikely that the exact locations of their landing and where they found/stole the Indian corn were accurately known. There is a lot of play made of the founding fathers' desire for religious freedom and only one small plaque in Plymouth to point out obliquely the uncomfortable truth that the religious and cultural freedom of the native Indian population was not respected, nor their freedom to exist.

We were lucky to return home before the big storm disrupted travel. Every storm brings down power lines and it is quite striking that all of the power lines are still above ground whereas we put them underground decades ago. The news is full of the impending storm and of course the presidential election. Perhaps I should write to the winner to suggest a large investment program to put the lines underground, thereby creating jobs and preventing power and phone outages which cost millions each year.

Other random observations in this trip: there is an Elm Street in every town and village we past, presumably that is why the film was called Nightmare on Elm Street, to scare everyone everywhere. Hotels cut costs by employing only one person on reception who doubles as concierge and deals with everything single handed, while trying to keep their smily face. You can be fined up to $10,000 for throwing litter on the highway but only $2,000 for tampering with the smoke alarm in the planes' loos. People keep working till they drop, plenty of 80 odd yr old servers in shops, cafes and restaurants, tourist info offices, museums etc. There are lots of eco loos which proudly say they use only 6 litres of water to flush, but they flush repeatedly at random and so use 24 to 30 litres per visit. Perhaps I should point that out too in my letter to the next president.