Visit to Provincetown, MA

While we are waiting for snow to fall this evening (we’re expecting 1-3 inches here in the city tonight/tomorrow from a rare October Nor’easter), I thought I would finish the post about our August trip to Provincetown, MA.

We stayed at Christopher’s by the Bay. We had reservations for 2 nights, but ended up just staying 1 night with the impending hurricane!

We like staying at bed & breakfasts because each one is so different and it’s a surprise when you get there.

Having booked less than a week before, it was slim-picking in P-town. But Christopher’s was a great place to stay. It’s less than a block from the main street that everything is on and is still quiet. We had a room on the top floor and it was an excellent value. We had a full bed and a shared bathroom. Again, each place is different and here they named the rooms after artists.

View of the back garden:

Breakfast table:

Where we ate breakfast:

There were lots of galleries and cute shops:

I loved these whales!!! They were cut from wood and looked so neat!

There were little walkways and alleys to shops and restaurants:

View of the beach:

In the afternoons, actors from the shows go out into the street, interact with the crowds, and hand out flyers for that night’s show:

There were several t-shirt shops:

There were lots of old houses that were kept up nice:

Another bed and breakfast:

We caught a sunset between 2 houses:

So we found a walkway to the beach:

We had our first Narragansett Fest. It’s the Narragansett (Rhode Island) brewery’s traditional German Oktoberfest style beer.

When we’re in a touristy place, we like to look around for a while and then find the postcards/prints for sale in the gift shops to see if we’ve seen most of the attractions. For P-town, there were lots of prints of the Lobster Pot so it’s one of the quintessential pictures of the city.

We went to the Lobster Pot and I got my first lobster roll:

For those of you that don’t know here’s what in a lobster roll- it’s lobster meat, tossed with mayonnaise, scallion, and diced celery on a roll. You eat it more like a hot dog rather than a sandwich. It was served with potato salad. It was okay- just okay- although the bread was awful. I was glad that I tried it since we were at the Lobster Pot.

Pilgrim Monument in the background:

The Pilgrim Monument was built between 1907-1910 to commemorate the first landing of the Mayflower Pilgrims in Provincetown on November 21, 1620. They spent 5 weeks on Cape Cod, before they sailed on to Plymouth.

It is the tallest all-granite structure in the United States. You can walk up to too! Hopefully you’re not afraid of heights:

During the climb, you can see interior stones that were donated by cities, towns and organizations from all of the United States.

The view from the top:

We weren’t really impressed with the top because it was raining and it wasn’t covered but there was a fence with gates all the way around and so it was hard to get a picture without getting the gate in it or getting wet:

We climbed back down and went into the museum where we learned that President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone (1907) and President William H. Taft led the dedication ceremony after the Pilgrim Monument’s completion in 1910.

The museum also housed a section of artifacts brought back from Arctic explorations around in 1913 by Provincetown native Donald B. MacMillan

By late afternoon on Saturday, a few businesses had boarded up their windows in preparation for Hurricane Irene:

This gallery was still open:

You can see the monument in the background:

Before we left, we got “fried dough” from the Portuguese bakery. We thought it looked like an alien. It was shaped a little funny, but it’s similar to what we call elephant ears back in Kentucky.

We got on the last ferry back to Boston before the storm:

We got to watch the Patriots football game:

Boston ended up just getting rain and some wind from Hurricane Irene, but other places like New York and Vermont had bad flooding.