LIFE

Ins and outs, ups and downs, swings and roundabouts (called a rotary here), rough with the smooth;  yes there are any number of clichés that can be applied to life.  And the last couple of days, coming to, and staying on, Cape Cod, have been such a cliché.

Stu and Jan assured me their friend’s house had functioning Wi-Fi; it hasn’t.  But even before I discovered that, the greatest tragedy of the trip (so far) was revealed.  I am nearing the realisation of the URL of this blog; that is it is nearly time for the wedding, it’s on Saturday.  So this entailed a completely different pack of my motorcycle’s luggage than on my first excursion.

You may recall the disaster of finding at lunchtime on that first trip’s first day that one of the side panniers had not been secured properly and had rested on the exhaust pipe for 3 hours baking my bag of electrics and toasting the netbook battery to, well, toast.

For this trip I have to take all the posh clothes, suit and a white jacket, so I carefully re-thought how to fit stuff in so that it was not so crowded the suit got badly crumpled.  This left 2 pairs of shoes over and they were carefully placed in the damaged pannier with the leather pair, soles down, over the hole to insulate from the heat.  Then I realised my wash bag was still not packed so I carefully placed it next to the shoes.  When I arrived it had shifted and was toasted too.  My portable electric razor was nothing but a twisted mass of plastic. I have had it for the best part of 40 years.  When my far more expensive Philishave gave up after 15 years I dug it out of the bathroom cupboard, cleaned the rust off the terminals and she fired up and gave me, I realised, an even better shave than I had become accustomed to.  Works (worked) on re-chargeable batteries that lasted a couple of months each time and it’ll never grace my chin again.  Truly distraught.  Being the heaviest object in the wash bag it had gravitated to the hole and, it turned out, not much else was damaged.  Manufactured in the days when they built things to last, I have an electric whisk at home that I remember my mother using, so that must be 50, and it still works perfectly.  I’m sure I’ll never find another as good.  So I had to buy some disposable razors; but it’s so long since I used one of those I am extremely nervous I’ll cut myself and turn up at the wedding with plasters all over my face.

Still Cape Cod is very pretty, if a little chilly today.  Fell asleep rather early after drowning my sorrows and woke at 6.  So I went for a wonderful early morning stroll on the beach where I took this photograph of birds feeding on the littoral; dashing out as the waves retreated and scampering back as they came in.  

Then the camera stopped working properly.  It’s developed the same kind of fault as the old one;  it doesn’t want to work outdoors but seems fine indoors.  What a bizarre puzzle.  So I am afraid no pictures of the rest of my day here.  I think it may be batteries as I brought the underpowered ones as spares, in error.

The main objective today was, as highly recommended by Stu and Jan, to go out whale watching.  I managed to find a café with Wi-Fi and contacted Stu and Jan to ask which of the two boats I’d found leaflets for was the best.  The answer came with the hope that I’d enjoyed the waves crashing on the shore during my early morning walk.  Well since the swell had been about 3 inches I replied thus.  Oh dear, came the response, the wind must have been in the wrong direction.

When I arrived at the boat station it transpired that the wind was in the wrong direction there too.  All trips were cancelled due to 6 - 8 foot waves.  One of Cape Cod’s little mysteries I suppose too weak one minute and too strong the next.  Although in fairness wind can change a lot in 4 hours.

I asked one of the boatmen where the best place I might see them from land was and followed that suggestion.  Nothing to be seen there, but a conversation with a local fisherman produced a classic: “Oh well the boatmen from that town would recommend here.  No, no if you want to see the whales the best place is Race Point, at the other end of the Cape”. So off I went in that direction.  The upshot of all this was a grand tour of most of Cape Cod; and no whales.  Still Cape Cod is very pretty.

What I did get at Race Point was a guided tour of a re-constructed life-saving station.  Ironically it had originally been constructed, in 1898; in the town I had visited first to try and spot whales, Chatham.   About 5 or 6 years ago the station had been bought back from a private owner by the US Coastguard, broken into two sections, and floated up the coast about 30 miles to Race Point.  By the late C19th the seaward coast of the Cape had become a notorious graveyard for ships heading to Boston, some 50 miles north, and a whole series of 20 odd of these stations had been set up to rescue unfortunate shipwrecked sailors.  This one was the only extant one left and is being restored to, as far as they can, its particular condition in 1902.  Why 1902?  I forgot to ask; but the volunteer coastguard/interpreters were very particular that it wasn’t a mish-mash of old artefacts associated with these rescue stations, but was specific to the equipment and condition of 1902.  I think maybe they’d found an inventory for that particular station in that particular year.

Getting into this house was a pantomime.  I was told there was a code for the door so I pushed the code on the keyboard at the bottom of the steps, rushed up the steps to open the door, and it was still locked.  This was repeated half a dozen times until I pushed another button on the keyboard and the whole thing fell off the wall to reveal a key, hidden behind it.  Ahh.

The other irritation, apart from the non-functioning Wi-Fi, which Jan put down to her friend not paying his telephone bill, is the kitchen sink.  I have searched the kitchen high and low and can find neither a plug, nor a plastic bowl.  How are you supposed to do the washing up?