American Revolution Road Trip: Cape Cod National Seashore

We took another break from the American Revolution side of our road trip on this day, because it is completely impossible for me to be near the coast and NOT go to the beach! As an added convenient excuse, the Cape Cod National Seashore offers a Junior Ranger badge, and as an added ADDED excuse, the ocean off of Cape Cod is the natural habitat of the great white shark:


We barely looked away from the water the entire time we were there, hoping to see a fin!

Well, we looked away a little, but only because the rocky shore was so interesting, as well! It's a national park, so I couldn't take any home with me, alas, but I really wanted to!

The kids weren't cold. I was!

There was a lot of trash on the beach, washed up from the ocean, so much that we were able to fill a giant plastic bag with rope and plastic bottles and randomness. I DID take a couple of pieces of interesting trash home as souvenirs!

I didn't recognize it until it was pointed out to me, but this is the lighthouse on the bag of Cape Cod potato chips!

 We visited several beaches along the seashore as we made our way up the coast to Provincetown (where the pilgrims first landed), and at each one we hung out, ran around, played, picked up trash, and watched for sharks:

We never did see any great white sharks, although we did see a couple of seal or sea lion heads out in the water, so sharks could have been hunting there!

This one had to miss ballet class that day, so it's good that she got some dancing in:

Even though I was a little chilly, I actually fell asleep here for a while.

At the visitor center up near Provincetown, we had to watch a documentary for the children's Junior Ranger badge. Um, it was the creepiest, most depressing documentary that I have ever seen at a national park!



There's a scene where the sailors are scooping stuff out of a whale's head, and another where they're hacking things off of a whale, and I'm not even sure if it's dead yet.

But don't worry, because those sailors all die in shipwrecks, anyway.

Shudder.

No shipwrecks, whales, or great white sharks to be found!

This day-long detour from our American Revolution theme made for a VERY long day in Boston the next day and a VERY short day in Philadelphia a couple of days later, but it was worth it. We know more about sharks, we know more about the sea, and, well...

...we know much, much, MUCH more than we maybe wanted to know about whaling.