September 23, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 8: Womp, Womp

Wompatuck

When we last left off, we were at Scusset Beach near Cape Cod, Massachusetts, complaining about Plymouth Rock.  Well, the following week, we headed to Wompatuck, another state park just south of Boston. Wompatuck is an interesting place – it used to be an World War II munitions factory and storage area, but most of the buildings were since torn down, and a forest arose in its place.

Wompatuck today is heavily wooded, but there are echoes of its former life scattered throughout the park:  heavy gates in front of roads to nowhere, an abandoned train transfer station, and the occasional fire hydrant in the middle of the woods.  In places, even the campground itself was abandoned – we found many neglected campsites and bathhouses being slowly overtaken by the forest.

Perhaps it was built too large, or perhaps it has something to do with what we just discovered while writing this post – Wompatuck is an active Superfund  site with potentially unexploded ordnance in the soil.  That would have been good information to known before we went exploring!  Nonetheless, the park was quite beautiful in some places, and hopefully disarmed.

Though the park was lovely, what we will remember most from Wompatuck are the bunkers.  Made of heavy concrete and built into the hills, there were bunkers sprinkled throughout the park and all along the hiking trails.  Always, the concrete exterior was covered with graffiti, sometimes quite artistically, sometimes much less so.  Given the number of empty beer bottles and condom wrappers at these sites, one might charitably call these bunkers “multi-use.”

The exception to the graffiti-clad bunkers was Bunker N-9, which is locked and painted a pristine eggshell white by local Boy Scouts.  The accompanying plaque suggests the bunker used to hold anti-submarine nuclear depth charges, which… first of all, the concept is preposterous (we actually first learned about these at the Groton Sub Museum), and second of all, Wompatuck seems pretty freaking close to Boston to be holding nuclear weapons.  Oh well – no harm, no foul?

Also, we found a beer bottle Christmas tree thing someone apparently set up in the woods, which is one great reason to only hike during the daytime.

World’s End

After a few hikes, Wompatuck State Park was starting to feel a little bombed out, so we headed to a nearby park called World’s End.  Located in Hingham, Massachusetts, World’s End is right on the water and features beautiful views of the Boston skyline.  It was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, who famously designed Central Park.  Fun fact:  once you start paying attention, you will see that FLO (as he preferred to be known) also apparently designed every other damn park on the East Coast, and possibly the world.

Either way, the park was pretty, and also it was very, very hot.  Friends, don’t start your road trip adventures in the middle of summer.

[New Orleans]

While we were staying at Wompatuck, Jake flew to New Orleans for a bachelor party.  There are only two shareable photos from that particular event – a real-life bar wench serving absinthe, and an interesting real estate marketing pitch.  We’ll “officially” be in New Orleans soon, though, so more pictures will certainly be forthcoming.

Happily, Heather was able to make friends with a dragonfly while Jake was gone.  She also reupholstered our couch, which will feature in our RV video tour as soon as we get around to making it.  (Given our current pace of updates, that should be no later than 2018.)

Boston

Just kidding!  We never actually got to see downtown Boston, although we’ve both been there before.  We did visit some friends in the area, and we did curse at the crazy Masshole driving, but we had to scrap our scheduled sightseeing to do something much more fun:  visit the DMV.

You may recall that we recently purchased a new car.  Well, it wasn’t the fastest process, starting with insurance: we were rejected by our existing insurance company (which insures the RV) because they could not “verify our identity.”  Apparently not an issue before!  We ended up getting different insurance, but because we bought the car in Rhode Island and are New York residents, we had to drive 3.5 hours across the state of Massachusetts to register the car in New York.

OK, fine.  It’s not like we have jobs we have to go to.  However, once we got to the New York DMV, we found out that the dealership had not actually given us any of the paperwork we needed, or even properly transferred the title!  So we had to drive back to the dealership in Rhode Island, drive half an hour away, discover they still hadn’t given us the proper paperwork, return to the dealership, and then drive back to Wompatuck.  And the next day, instead of sightseeing in Boston and dinner with our friends, we had to drive another 3.5 hours to New York State and back, bringing the grand total to something like 15 hours of driving across Massachusetts in two days.

Womp, womp.

If that explanation confused you, which it probably did since it even confuses us, here’s the short version:  it took forever.  And if we sound bitter at the dealership, it’s only because we hate them.

via GIPHY

Last Bits

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Charleston, South Carolina, enjoying some Southern hospitality (and air conditioning) and celebrating Heather’s birthday!  Next up:  Savannah, Georgia.

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Shamefully missed a prior update?  You can check them out below.  We’ll just play on our phones while we wait.

Next Post: Week 8.1: Maine, Part 1

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September 14, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 7: Cape Cod – It’s Gonna Rain

Hi friends! We’ve got a shiny new blog post for you. We know, we know, you weren’t expecting one for another week, at least, but we were so bored excited to share that we decided to ship one out early. Alternatively, we realized that our backlog has grown so large that we need to do at least two posts a week in order to have any hope of finishing this decade. So, no more excuses and no more procrastination. Time to strap on our blog helmets, buckle down our blog seatbelts, and blast off into the… blogosphere, we guess.

Hmm. That’s an annoying word, blogosphere. Really, just the word “blog” is so aurally displeasing. It’s a real earsore. Maybe we should be blasting off into the “chatmosphere”? That’s pretty fun, although this is not really a chat, more of a monologue. And if we’re being honest, it’s getting fairly stream of consciousness here, so maybe we’re having more of a ramble than a monologue. Ramblosphere doesn’t quite work, though – just seems like an atmosphere full of Rambos, just shooting and yelling and revisioning history, which is not at all the tone we’re looking for. It would probably make for a pretty sweet movie, though.

Wait, what were we talking about again?  Oh right! Post. Here you go, fresh from the ramblosphere.

Scusset Beach

After our stunning success at purchasing a car in Rhode Island, we headed to Scusset Beach State Reservation, which is a Massachusetts state park located on the ocean near the very beginning of Cape Cod. As the name implies, there is a beach at Scusset, and enterprising and extremely foolhardy RV-ers can actually park and stay overnight on the sand if they so choose. That did not seem like a great plan to us, because of things like “no traction” and “high tide” and “sand freaking everywhere,” so we stayed slightly inland.

Scusset was recently renovated and was definitely a good deal, but here’s a full list of the weather patterns we experienced there:

  • Rain

And here’s a list of the activities we were able to take part in at Scusset:

  • Looking at the rain
  • Listening to the rain
  • Getting rained on
  • Waiting for it to stop raining

There was one brief period when we arrived during which the rain paused, and we headed to the beach to check out the scene. Although there were almost no humans there, we saw quite a few seagulls, who were taking advantage of the stiff incoming breeze to hover in place over the sand. Check out this vine:

Hover birds! We also took a few photos while it was not actively raining:

Cape Cod:  Great Island Trail Death March

Hoverbirds aside, Scusset was a bit of a bust, so we decided to drive out along Cape Cod. Along the way, we went for a hike at Great Island Trail, a highly regarded national park in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. The scenery was as pretty as advertised, with beautiful ocean views, an interior forest, and windswept grasses which looked almost like sand dunes.

Unfortunately, the day turned out to be extraordinarily hot. What’s worse, the trail took us primarily over very loose sand dunes, and hiking on sand (while wearing shoes) is not a whole lot of fun. It was rough. The back end of the hike was about 2.5 miles along the beach, under a blazing sun and over constantly shifting sand, until we were too tired to even complain properly. But we did snap some photos! Enjoy them in an air conditioned room with a cold beverage, for our sakes.

Cape Cod: Provincetown

Directly after our hike, we stopped to grab some ice cream (side note: we have eaten more ice cream in the last two months than in the previous two years), then headed up to Provincetown, which is at the very tip of Cape Cod. Provincetown is a very lively town with a culture best described as “rainbow,” and the weather had finally cooled down enough to enjoy it. We walked through the main drag and had a great dinner at The Lobster Pot, a P-town institution Jake remembered from a visit with his family as a kid. We even got to snap some pics of the sunset from the Lobster Pot’s deck during dinner.

A photo posted by @nothingmundane on

Plymouth

Our final activity while staying at Scusset was a visit to Plymouth, Massachusetts, home of the fabled Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock is the alleged spot where the Pilgrims first landed, and it’s an intensely boring landmark in person. It’s just a medium-sized rock with a date carved into it, surrounded by walls so that future generations can also be disappointed by it.

Luckily, we were prepared for this possibility, and had scoped out things to do in Plymouth before we landed there. We ended up walking around the town, which is fairly cute, seeing some semi-historic sculptures, and buying some delicious beer at an awesome craft beer store. We also ate some roasted cauliflower at a local gastropub, which looked suspiciously like brains. (The cauliflower, not the restaurant.)  If you want to imagine this all occurring in a montage, we won’t stop you.

What’s next:  Currently, we are in a campground near Washington, D.C., at which we have seen roughly equal amounts of people and deer.  Next up:  monuments, museums, and Richmond, Virginia.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  It might just save your life!  Probably not, though.

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Next Post: Spamalot

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