See Cape Cod Campground List and Best Campgrounds below.
New England fog can often roll in off the cold ocean in Spring but it usually burns off by mid morning. A Cape Cod biking vacation can be pleasurable anytime after March. The Spring months will be less crowded . The paved bike trails through the Cape Cod dunes and the
Cape Cod Rail Trails are great places for safe and convenient biking and they offer interesting places to make photographs.
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| Bike trail east end of the Cape Cod Canal |
The Cape offers paved trails alongside the
Cape Cod Canal, and also a rail trail along Buzzards Bay from Woods Hole to Falmouth. The Cape Cod Rail Trail is a paved trail through the pine forests of Brewster and onto the beaches of Eastham. In the Lower Cape there are several dunes trails through Wellfleet and Provincetown. During a week-long camping vacation you can visit them all.
RV camping without reservations is possible in Spring and September and October. In the Summer, impromptu camping on Cape Cod can be a tricky prospect because the sites are usually booked well in advance. You can take your chances with the last minute cancellation and the standby list.
Cape Cod is interesting in all seasons.
Except during the Spring rains and the one or two Winter Northeast storms, there may be no better way to see Cape Cod than on a bicycle.
Two books could be amiable companions on a Cape Cod vacation, Henry David Thoreau's, "Cape Cod," and Henry Beston's, "The Outermost House."
Thoreau started one of his trips to Cape Cod with a stop in Cohasset, MA where the Irish victims of a shipwreck in 1849 were being buried in a mass grave. The ship was the Saint John from Galway. It was loaded with Irish immigrants who were escaping the famine. Thoreau watched as shattered remnants of the ship and its passengers where washed ashore. The unidentified and unclaimed that died on the rocks offshore were brought to the hill and buried in a mass grave where Thoreau passed and wrote in his journal:
"...and behind rocks twenty feet high, lay a part of one side of the vessel, still hanging together. It was, perhaps, forty feet long, by fourteen wide. I was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, than I had been at the sight of the smaller fragments before. The largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and I saw that no material could withstand the power of the waves; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks.
Some of these timbers, however, were so rotten that I could almost thrust my umbrella through them. They told us that some were saved on this piece, and also showed where the sea had heaved it into this cove, which was now dry. When I saw where it had come in, and in what condition, I wondered that any had been saved on it."
http://thoreau.eserver.org/capecd01.html
Thoreau was on his way south by train when he stopped in Cohasset to investigate the shipwreck. He would continue his trip by horse-drawn coach and arrive in the town of Sandwich later to continue south on the Old Kings Highway. Sandwich offers good camping with wooded sites at
Shawme-Crowell State Forest just off the old Route 6, not far from where Thoreau traveled on his way to Provincetown.
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| Shawmee-Crowell State Forest camping |
With a short drive or bike ride from the park you can visit the
Sandwich Glass Museum, The Hoxie House, the oldest house on Cape Cod, the Thornton Burgiss House, Brer Rabbit Author, and you can bike the paved trail beside the Cape Cod Canal.
Fourteen miles of flat paved trail serves as a service road for government vehicles beside the Cape Cod Canal and the road is open to visitors for biking and walking. With walkways over both of the bridges that span the waterway, you can bike west to Buzzards Bay or east to Scusset Beach.
There is a free parking lot near the power plant and from there bike west on the canal trail. Once under the Sagamore Bridge you will have the Bourne Bridge four miles ahead. Just after the Bourne Bridge you will see the sign for the Aptucxet Trading Post. You can wheel your bike through the entrance for a visit to the museum.
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| Aptucxet Trading Post, a replica museum of the 1627 trading post |
The Aptucxet building is a replica of the first trading post built at the site in 1627 by the
Plymouth Pilgrims on a trail the Indians used to portage their canoes over what was then the Manomet River.
The Cape Cod Canal was built starting in 1909 along part of the old waterway and the river is no longer visible except where it enters the canal from the stream that comes south from Great Herring Pond in Plymouth.
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Grey Gables, the private railroad station of Grover Cleveland
when he lived on Cape Cod |
Archaeological excavations at the trading post site were done in the 1850s and again in the 1920s, which led, according to museum literature, to the construction in 1930 of a replica building on the original foundation. Nearby, you can visit the old restored railroad station called Grey Gables, used in the 1890s by US President Grover Cleveland. After a short walk on the driveway you find a replica Dutch windmill built by artist Joseph Jefferson, a friend of Cleveland's.
Back on the bike trail, you soon come to what looks like an erector set version of the Tower of London, the railroad bridge at the west end of the canal.
The bridge was the longest elevating center span bridge in the world at the time of its construction in 1933.
The murmur of gears and the rustle of cables will signal the lowering of the center section, as huge counterweights of the bridge lift. What appeares to be a mute hunk of gothic metal artwork will come to life as the 544-foot center section of the bridge slowly lowers from its height of 135 feet above the water. The span clanks into place at nearly sea level to allow the passage of trains.
It drops a couple of times a day for the passage of railway cars and freight. The freight consists of trash that is hauled off the Cape to a recycling mill inland.
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Railroad bridge Cape Cod Canal
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The lowering of that bridge center section by cables and counterweights is no small task in the middle of a waterway that serves seagoing ships. The Army Corps of Engineers handles the details of the Cape Cod Canal.
The Cape Cod Canal Museum tells the story of how the Corps carefully manage the passage of vessels. All boats using this sea-level canal must have motor power.
You realize why when you see the railroad bridge down across the waterway and a current of about six knots running as the tide changes. That tide changes twice daily so there is nearly always a brisk current running in the Cape Cod Canal.
It is seven miles back to the start of the canal and to the campsite.
From the campgrounds you can bike to the Sandwich Glass Museum, the Heritage Plantation antique auto collection, and the
East End of the Canal to the Cape Cod Canal Museum.
Next: East End, Cape Cod Canal
