R and J in the USA

Our next state, and the last one on our pre-planned itinerary, was up. Massachusetts. We rolled in and headed right to Nickerson State Park for our first night on the famed Cape Cod. Having lived in Massachusetts for a year after college, just outside of Boston, Julie quickly felt a sense of returning home. That feeling surged even more when, just after crossing the state line into Massachusetts, Ryan paused just a few seconds too long when choosing what lane to be in and we promptly got a solid honk accompanied by the Massachusetts state bird from another driver. Ah, Massachusetts. So good to be back.

We made our way up to Provincetown for a delightful visit and walk down it’s charming streets and a delicious delving into more fried seafood, and, of course, more ice cream. Ryan had signed us up for a whale watching trip with the oldest whale watching fleet on the east coast, and it did not disappoint! We saw a bounty of humpback whales – tails, water spouts, and all, a school of dolphins playfully swimming alongside the boat, and even a shark! Not the Jaws type of shark, but, being somewhere off the coast of Massachusetts, flashes of Amity Island still passed through our minds. 

We finished a fun day on the tip of the Cape with a fun surprise waiting for us at our next Harvest Host location. We were scheduled to stay in the parking lot of Cape Cod Beer, a microbrewery in Hyannis. We stopped inside their gift shop to make a purchase or two (including a lace bag of lavender that has become Julie’s favorite item in the van, hanging just above her bedside where she can drift off to the delightful wafts of lavender’s soothing aroma). As we headed back towards our van, we saw a band coming back from break to entertain folks outside the pub. The band turned out to be AMAZING, playing one after the other classic from the 80s and 90s, often mashing them up into retro medleys. And boy could the lead singer WAIL! We had a very early ferry to catch and 5K to run on Nantucket Island in the morning, but rather than do the wise thing and get settled into bed, would you believe Julie couldn’t resist dancing her butt off? (If you know Julie, you are currently having no problem believing this.) We were both super into the band before the tired and the time called us to bed. After coming down from the high, we fell asleep to the not too distant sounds of the band rocking on outside the van. Already anticipating the tired that tomorrow held, we went to sleep with no regrets.

The next morning greeted us with the first ever alarm clock of the trip. Our ferry to Nantucket departed at 6:10 AM, and the alarm clock screamed at us before 5:00 AM to get our butts up and at ‘em. The ferry took longer than expected, and Julie had also identified the wrong location for the race. The actual race location was six miles away from the ferry dock rather than the one mile she had thought. Our Nantucket 5k (that you can read about in our 5K section) started at 8:10. By the time our bikes were unloaded from the ferry it was after 7:30. This meant that biking to our race as planned wouldn’t get us there on time. We found a rack to hitch our bikes to. Having paid $30 to ferry them to and from the island, they would spend the whole day right there on that rack. We took a very expensive taxi ride to the race, arriving with ten minutes to spare to grab our race bibs and warm up. Oh, by the way, it was a gorgeous day, and a beautiful place in which to run the race.

Afterwards, six miles away from town with no bikes, no knowledge of the island, and a fruitless phone call to the taxi company, we weren’t quite sure how we would get back to town, where the ferry and our bikes were waiting for us. Julie was up for walking. Ryan, not so much. We asked around and found out there was a free shuttle that circled the island. The next step was to figure out where and when to actually pick it up. We were both hot, hungry, and tired, and ready to get to a somewhere of any kind. We started walking on tired legs in the direction of what we understood to be the nearest shuttle stop about half a mile away. We ran into a local who was more than happy to take us under her wing and tell us all about the island (read more about her in our People Along the Way section). She told us that we were just one shuttle stop away from a must-see part of the island and her home of 30 years, Sconset. A great sandwich shop and a beautiful Bluff Walk awaited, she assured us, and was a must on any Nantucket Island adventure. We were relieved that our post-race strandedness was morphing into a just-right spontaneous adventure that we couldn’t have planned any better than it ended up coming together. Definitely one of the fun parts of van life. Plans are great, helpful, and tie the thing together, but the unexpected adventures sure do delight. Neither the sandwich shop, the Bluff Walk, nor the town of Sconset disappointed. Enthusiastic thumbs up to all!

We took the free shuttle back to downtown Nantucket, grabbed some lunch, shopped around, and found ourselves too tired to make our way to the beach. Even though there was plenty more island to explore, we were ready to get back to a place where we could lie down and, well, pass out. We made our way to Plymouth, where we grabbed a seafood dinner and a campsite for the night, whooped from a full day.

We realized we had an itinerary reality to face. The next day we had planned to visit the Plymouth museums, then go into Boston, tour the capitol (quickly), grab a Sox game, and THEN head all the way out to Tanglewood on the other side of the state before going hiking in the Berkshires the next day. Long story short, not possible. And, to boot, that would put us in Boston on a Sunday, another itinerary blunder for visiting a state capitol. But if we didn’t go into Boston that day, we would also lose our shot at seeing a Sox game. Julie struggled with the idea of visiting Boston and NOT going to a Sox game. Can we really say we’ve visited Massachusetts without ever being surrounded by thousands of screaming Boston fans? We decided that touring Fenway Park would have to do.

We visited the Plymouth museums in the morning and then made the drive out to Tanglewood to see Brandi Carlile. Already on Julie’s list of favorite musicians, it was a nice coincidence that she was the artist playing Tanglewood the night we would be there. This brought Julie’s Brandi Carlile concert total to four. Even with skipping Boston, we still barely made it to the show on time. The concert was fantastic. Afterward, we traveled another 45 minutes to Daughters of the American Revolution State Park to lay our weary heads.

Our itinerary audible had us trading our day of hiking Mount Greylock in the Berkshires for a Monday in the Boston and, the real icing on the cake, a FULL day at one of Julie’s favorite places in the whole world – Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. We made it to Boston, found a great place to park using Spot Hero, and hopped on our bikes to ride through the city, one of Julie’s favorite things to do in Boston. We rode past the office where Julie worked the year after college so Ryan could see it, then made a beeline toward what Julie remembered as the best tacos ever at Maria’s Taqueria in the theater district.

After wiping the leftover taco grease from our hands, it was off to the Massachusetts state capitol for a tour. We took a quick peak at the freedom trail then biked over to Fenway Park (where, Julie is ashamed to say, she never went to once in her year of living just outside the city). We went on the Fenway Park tour, and it was great! We got to see the Green Monster and the red chair. And there was even some action on the field. Young men from the Cape Cod League played ball for the audience of scouts checking out their skills.

From Fenway, we headed across river to Harvard Square for some pizza at Julie’s favorite pizza place (the best gluten free, dairy free pizza on her list). She happily realized the company was from Portland, Maine, which meant there would be another slice of her favorite pizza in the near future. Post-pizza, we – of course – finished out the evening with some ice cream. After a quick text exchange with one of Julie’s dearest friends from high school, who was unfortunately out of town but happy to have us park in her driveway, we headed to a nice little neighborhood in Newton, Mass, to sleep.

The next day we made our way to Concord. Ryan took up residence in the local coffee shops. Eager to use our first open day in a while to be able to sit and get stuff done, he unfortunately spent the bulk of his day on the phone with Apple trying to deal with a computer gone haywire. Julie, unaware of Ryan’s stresses, enjoyed the entire day blissing her face off sitting in the van overlooking one of her favorite bodies of water in the world, Walden Pond. A moment arose where a park official, needing to communicate with a family whose English wasn’t great, called out in the parking lot, “Does anyone speak Russian?” Julie was OVERJOYED at this unexpected opportunity to be of service. Though her Russian was rusty at best, she was able to facilitate enough communication to move events forward. This being one of the main dreams for her language learning, to be able to be a linguistic bridge in such unexpected moments, Julie’s cloud nine elevated a few miles higher into the sky. Eventually she hopped in the water and, despite having done pretty much zero swimming in quite a while and absolutely zero actual swim training of any kind in years, decided to swim the circumference of the entire lake. A mile and a half of swimming later, with multiple stops to catch her breath along the way, Julie was wiped in the most wonderful of ways.

She headed to a local museum in its final minutes of open hours while Ryan was in Concord perusing the “Local Authors” section of the town’s bookshop. Hawthorne, Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson were casually placed in this most humble of categories. America’s literary elite were just a stack of local authors for a place like Concord, that more recently could also add Doris Kearns Goodwin to the shelf.

Julie headed into Concord to do a quick run in the still fairly brutal summer heat and grab Ryan. We returned together to Walden Pond for a gorgeous sunset and heated up leftovers for dinner to round out the day.  With that, we said a fond farewell to Massachusetts and headed north.