We are only 19 days in and the adventure is already rich with emotion. Tomorrow, before dawn, the true travel begins. By the end of January we’ll visit at least six National Parks and make thirteen stops.
Although it pains me to leave the Cape Cod National Seashore, an odyssey beckons. We have our plans, but there is never any clue how things will actually turn out, who we’ll meet, and what measure of magic may befall us.
John Steinbeck captured the unknown of a grand coddiwomple in Travels with Charley.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys.
It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip.
Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this, a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
We’re leaving you with these postcards from our final day in Provincetown. We’ll see other beaches, but none will be as wild, primitive, and empty as what we’ve enjoyed.
Tomorrow, we’re heading into a storm and possible flooding. Fingers crossed, but I have faith everything will work out as it should.
Oh, and don’t think we are done with Cape Cod yet. There are still at least three stories in my pen. Perhaps the ink will spill onto the page in the coming weeks, and some will last until we return to the White Mountains in May.
We’ll be off the Cape before sunrise tomorrow, heading into the unknown—and a storm.
We began our last full day here with a kiss of snow on the trails in single-digit windchill, visited Norman Mailer’s grave where he is buried with his SIXTH(!!!) wife, and ended it by walking the sun home for the last hour of dwindling light. As you’ll notice by the video, the wind remains fierce. We did not have any company because of how brutally cold it was on Herring Cove Beach.
THERE IS THAT LAW OF LIFE, SO CRUEL AND SO JUST THAT ONE MUST GROW OR ELSE PAY MORE FOR REMAINING THE SAME. ~ NORMAN MAILER
Onward, by all means.
Goodnight!
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