Cape Cod

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We had a wonderful day on Martha’s Vineyard and our plans to stay at the Wareham Elks Lodge gives us 2 more full days to explore the area further. We could have used one of the days to take the Ferry to Nantucket but we needed to get in a different style of exercise  - something more strenuous than a slow pace walking around tourist areas. We saw a rail trail not too far away that looked interesting. The Shining Sea Bikeway starts in North Falmouth and goes 10.7 miles south to Woods Hole. The forecast had very nice weather for a 21 mile or so bike ride. It is only a 16 mile drive to the northern parking lot so we are able to get a fairly early start. Since this was a Saturday, we weren’t the only ones with this ride in mind but there were still a few parking spots when we arrived.

The trail is paved but feels rural at points even though this is a fairly residential area.  There were a few road crossings but none are too bad. We would have biked right over one interesting spot along the trail had there not been a geocache to identify it for us. There is a tunnel under the old rail bed that was used by a local farmer to get his cows from one field to another without the need to cross the train tracks. The tunnel is only large enough for a cow to walk through. I needed to crouch down in order to get to the other side. Alas, I didn’t find the geocache but finding this unusual feature was reward enough.

Mural Along the Trail

Shining Sea Bikeway

Cow Tunnel

About 6 miles into the ride, we got to another scenic spot. Little Sippewissett Marsh is just to the west of the trail. There were a few waterfowl in the area as we passed but surprisingly no boats or kayaks.

Little Sippewissett Marsh

Around 7.5 miles into the ride, we saw something familiar. It it the huge parking lot for the ferry which looked just as crowded at it was yesterday. Just beyond that is the town of Falmouth. Since it was close to noon, we decided to get off the trail and bike into town to attempt a virtual geocache near the town square. The beautiful church has a bell cast by Paul Revere in 1796. Our timing couldn’t have been any better. The bell rings on the hour and since it was 12 PM, we got to hear it ring for a long time. This also worked well as a lunch stop to enjoy the sandwiches we had along with us. We also biked through the parking lot of the Falmouth Elks Lodge to determine if we could have parked the rig here. It looked like we might have been able to get in to the parking lot, but there were a few tree branches that were questionably low and may have caused us problems.

Paul Revere's Bell

After our diversion, we head back to the bike path and continue south. Just beyond 10 miles, we get to Falmouth Beach. It was extremely busy with other cyclists and plenty of people walking or jogging. We needed to slow down considerably to avoid running into people not paying attention.

Falmouth Beach

We had seen on our maps something called Nobska Lighthouse and thought it sounded like a place worth checking out. It looked to be about a half mile off the bike path. When we got to an intersecting street named Fay Road, we found a side path to the road from the trail and we proceeded along it until we reached the lighthouse. It is a very pretty setting with the lighthouse and building sitting about 50 above the ocean on Nobska Point.

Nobska Lighthouse

After our detour, we head back to the bike path and continue another mile into Woods Hole. We only go a little bit beyond the ferry terminal since we were already up to 14 miles with the few side trips we had taken and we knew it would be about 11 miles back to the car if we stick to the bike path.

Boat at Woods Hole

Display at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

Calm Waters of Little Harbor

There are several colorful murals along the path, but the place we hadn’t noticed on our ride out was more evident heading back. From the trail, we at first just assumed we were looking at a campground. But then we noticed that there were dozens of Airstream trailers on the section of the campground we could see. It wasn’t that likely that a large group of Airstream owners just happened to be camping here together. Then I noticed that many of the trailers had an external air conditioner sitting on a concrete pad just behind the rigs. It turns out the place is called Autocamp Cape Cod. It is a place where you don’t need to have a camper to camp here. Later, looking at an aerial view, there seems to be at least 60 trailers setup. They cost about $225 and up a night. Not cheap, but a novel experience.

Recent Mural

Airstreams at Autocamp

We made it back to the car with just under 25 miles under our saddles. It was definitely a nice ride and a good way to get in some exercise.

Caboose at Silver Lounge Restaurant

For our last day, we thought we should explore some more of Cape Cod. The drive from Wareham to Provincetown, at the very tip of the cape, is just over 70 miles. But that would be following US Route 6 which runs through the middle of the cape. We wanted to visit some of the coastal towns which would greatly increase the distance. We selected quite a few stops based on interesting sounding geocaches, parks or towns. Given the number of places we hoped to see along the drive, there was no way of knowing whether we would make it all the way to Provincetown or not.

We set off to our first destination - Fresh From the Vine Cranberry Bog in West Yarmouth. It’s not like we are big fans of cranberries or know much about how they are grown or harvested. There are likely plenty of roadside stands in this part of the country that sell fresh cranberries at this time of year, but we were more interested in seeing a bog where they are grown. This place was on our route and was described as allowing visitors to wander around the farm.

Entrance to Bog

The farm looks to be around 30 acres or so with several roads that wander through the bogs. The colors were starting to get pretty vibrant but our timing wasn’t perfect. It was a little early in the season to watch them actually harvesting the cranberries.

Overlooking the Bog

Water Channels Run Through Bog

The roads are elevated above the bogs by several feet and there are channels of water crisscrossing the bogs. We could see the cranberries were quite abundant and looked to be close to being ready for harvesting. The outside loop around the bogs is about 1 mile and we enjoyed walking around. There was some rather specialized farm equipment that must get used during harvest but it was hard to tell exactly how they might work.

Almost Ripe Cranberries

Boat Used During Cranberry Harvest

Possible Cranberry Vacuum?

On the backside of the property is a large pond and nearby was a tractor with a large PTO driven pump. When one section of the field is ripe, the tractor pumps in water from the pond to flood the field. The ripe cranberries will float, much like you see in an Ocean Spray commercial, and are vacuumed off the surface of the flooded bog. As we headed back to the car, we feel obligated to buy some even though we aren’t sure what we will do with them yet.

Pond Next to Cranberry Bog

Tractor and Pump

Fresh Cranberries

Our next stop was 10 miles further east near the town of West Harwich. Lee Baldwin Memorial Woodlands has a trail just under a mile long, but we aren’t here for the walk but to look for a geocache that has a good number of favorite points awarded to it. This one is what’s known as a multi-cache. The way they typically work is a container at the posted coordinates will give you the coordinates to the next stage. You must go from stage to stage until you get to the final cache where the logbook is hidden. Only then can you claim the find.

We have found nearly 600 multi-caches in our 15 years of caching. They can be frustrating since some of the longer ones might have a dozen stages and cover many miles of trail and all it takes is to not find one of the stages and then you are stuck with a Did Not Find (DNF). We enjoy finding a well done multi so we wanted to see why this one had so many favorite points. We didn’t have time to waste on a really long hike, so we hoped this one would be easy and didn’t have too many stages. Stage one wasn’t too far from the parking lot and Chris made the find. I managed to find the remaining 3 stages without a problem. The picture below shows why!

Creative "Multi-cache"

Harbor Along Cape Cod Drive

Next stop was in the town of Chatham. Our goal was to complete a webcam cache. This style of cache is quite rare nowadays. The concept for these is to get a screenshot from the webcam with us in the picture. These came out before smartphones existed so you used to have to get a buddy sitting at their computer to monitor the webcam and grab a screenshot when we were in the frame. No new webcam caches are allowed to be created since around 2005, and we only have completed 28 of them in all our travels so we were amazed to discover that there are two active webcam caches on the cape. We made it our mission to get them. The one in Chatham was a bit unusual in that the camera only updates the image once an hour on the half hour, so we needed to time our visit accordingly.

We arrived in town around noon, planning to get our image at 12:30. This town was very busy since it was a beautiful Sunday and lots of people were out and about shopping and eating in the local restaurants. As we drove through town to scope out the parking situation, we ended up at the Chatham Lighthouse. Parking was crazy here as well, but somebody was pulling out as we drove past so we stopped to get a quick photo before heading back to downtown. The webcam was pointing out of the front window of a bookstore. I dropped Chris off while I tried to find a parking spot. When I got there, we only had to wait a few minutes before the camera did its thing.

Shoreline in Chatham

Old Coast Guard Ship

Chatham Lighthouse

Our Webcam Photo

With this mission accomplished, we can start our journey further north on the cape. The next planned stop is in the Cape Cod National Seashore at a place called Fort Hill. This National Seashore starts near Fort Hill and extends to the north another 40 miles with plenty of sites to see along the way. Since it is already 1:30, we will have to be selective in what stops we make beyond here.

Trailhead at Fort Hill

This spot was settled by Pilgrims in 1644. We had a virtual geocache to log here and we did the 1 mile walk around the perimeter but it turns out there isn’t a whole lot of stuff to see here remaining from its early days. Near the end of the walk is the ornate Captain Penniman House built in 1868. It was an okay stop, but I suspect there were better places to visit.

Distant Coast Guard Station

Beautiful Captain Penniman House

Just a couple miles north is the Salt Pond Visitor Center. This was a worthwhile stop. It allows us to stamp our National Park Passport as well as watch the movie in the theater. There are lots of informational displays that helped us understand about this area. Plus we could get some information on other parts of the seashore to help decide what other places we can fit in before the end of the day.

Salt Pond Visitor Center

Old Fresnel Lens

One suggestion was to visit Nauset Light Beach where we will be able to see 4 lighthouses. If we went straight there, we should be able to get in on the volunteer talk. The larger Nauset Lighthouse has an interesting history. It was originally built in 1877 next to the lighthouse we had seen earlier in the day at Chatham to be its twin but was deconstructed and rebuilt here in 1923. Although it was initially 300 feet closer to the cliff along the shore of the ocean. In 1996, the shore had eroded to within 35 feet of the lighthouse and it was moved in one piece to its present location.

Nauset Light

Closer View of Lighthouse

The very first lighthouse here was built in 1838 and is about a quarter mile east of this point. A path leads to the Three Sisters Lighthouses. Given the trees towering over these lighthouses, it’s a bit hard to imagine these used to be visible from the sea. Only one of them has a light sitting atop the tower.

One of Three Sisters

The Other Two

It was already 3:30 so we only had about 90 minutes of daylight left. It was still a 30 minute drive just to get to Provincetown so we wouldn’t get a good chance to look around and just going to say we were there didn’t seem worth it. Plus we weren’t exactly sure what there was to see in Provincetown. So we picked one more lighthouse further up the coast. The Highland Light is also known as Cape Cod Light since it was the very first lighthouse built on the Cape. Commissioned by George Washington in 1797 as the 20th lighthouse in the country. The original wooden tower and a subsequent brick lighthouse was built closer to the 125 tall cliff wall. Beach erosion forced the construction of the present lighthouse and keeper’s house in 1857.

Highland Light aka Cape Cod Light

This lighthouse was actually open. The house portion is now a visitor center, store and museum all in one. When we went in to look around, the woman at the cash register asked if we wanted to tour the lighthouse. She said that her husband would be leading a group in a five minutes, and for a few bucks, we could join that group. We had seen several lighthouses today but none of them had been open so this was a lucky stop. There were about 9 of us on the tour and the man was quite knowledgeable about the facts and history of this lighthouse.

After our history lesson, we all get to climb up the spiral staircase. The view from up top was pretty amazing. The lamp and lens has been updated since the early days but it is still pretty interesting to see in action.

Spiral Staircase Up

View Inside Lighthouse

Looking North Over Keeper's House

View to the East

We stayed up top longer than the rest of the group and when we finally came back down, the guy was leading the next tour group. We wandered around the outside for a bit but it was starting to get late and we wanted to start the long drive back home.

Closeup of LED Lamp/Lens

Looking Down

Nearby Air Traffic Equipment and Jenny Lind Tower

We still needed to try for the second webcam cache at a place just south of us called Cahoon Hollow. The webcam was mounted in the Beachcomber restaurant. It took us a little bit of time to understand where the camera was pointing and how long the delay was between us moving into the frame and a picture being taken. The place was closed and nobody was around so we didn’t have any distractions or the need to feel self conscious. Picture quality was poor but good enough for our needs and we still had a little bit of sunshine left.

Beach Near Webcam

Our Second Webcam of the Day!

It was a much quicker drive back to the rig since we didn’t have any more stops to make. Cape Cod definitely needs to be on our radar for more exploration. And while the Wareham Elks Lodge has no services, it is a fairly convenient place to stay and likely never is crowded with other campers. That likely cannot be said for real campgrounds in the area. If we make it back again, we will need to take the ferry to Nantucket to see how that place compares to Martha’s Vineyard.