I didn't know until Saturday night whether or not I would even have any time to explore on Sunday. My flight was scheduled to leave at 6:30, which I could make just fine with the ninety-minute ferry trip, but not the two-hour bus ride. And as expert as I have been getting at racing through airports, it isn't really my favorite mode of transportation, so if the ferry wasn't running I was going to have to take the 10 am bus, and then find something to do in the Boston airport for six hours. But the weather had calmed down and, while I did take the precaution of not eating the "egg mcmuffin" they prepared at the B&B for breakfast, it looked like it would be okay to travel by water.
I had pretty much covered the shopping possibilities on Saturday, so my plans for Sunday consisted of walking to the end of town and maybe out to the sandspit at the tip of the Cape. Once you get away from the downtown touristy area, Provincetown is really just ridiculously cute. Honestly, it's like someone cut a picture of a New England coastal town out of a book and pasted it up around you. One can only assume that it costs a minor fortune to live there.
The sand spit I was trying to get to isn't actually connected to the mainland by nature, only by a breakwater/walkway made of big slabs of stone across the salt marsh. There isn't actually that much to see there, just a couple of lighthouses and some dunes, but it was a destination, of sorts, being on the end of things. I was walking across the causeway, teetering in my cork wedges and balancing my kate spade bag on my arm, and I realized that I am not entirely the person I used to be. Then I took off my shoes and rolled up my pants, because I'm not that different, and at that rate I was going to break an ankle.
In the end, I didn't actually make it all the way across; it was further than it looked and it was starting to spit rain, so I got about a third of the way and then turned around. My thought was to walk back to town along the beach, which is supposed to be open to the public. Which I guess it is, but they don't make it easy. I got to the beach by blantantly tresspassing through a cluster of vacation cottages (they looked midmorning quiet and vacant, but I heard dance music thumping in one; possibly either the earliest or the latest party going). The beach was divvied up into sections by low walls and piers, but no one showed up to stop me from going across them. In fact, no one showed up at all, which was why, in spite of the weather, I was glad to have come so early in the season
I made it back to the inn in time to gather my things and borrow the owners' power cable for my computer for a few minutes before one of them drove me down to the pier (appreciated, again, because it had suddenly started raining very hard. Again.)
So I took the ferry out of the rain and back to Boston where, despite the city's brilliant policy of actively discouraging cabs from taking you to the airport, I managed to make it to my flight without running or being forced to give up my seat on the overbooked plane. That I made it home just fine should be obvious by now, seeing as that was two weeks ago, but I will say that I enjoyed the audio channel United offers to allow you to listen in on the air traffic conversations, if only because it lets you know exactly why you are twenty minutes late in taking off, and not to get excited when you start moving, because you're only going to another runway.
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