We awoke in our campsite in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, and our fearless leader Tom scoured the internet for things to do. Seemed that if you did all the right things you could drive your 4 wheel drive vehicle on the sand and see the shore sights. What could go wrong?
Well, you need an Over Sand Permit. So we drove to the almost deserted permit office and talked to the nice lady ranger. In order to get a permit you needed a whole bunch of get-your-stuck-vehicle out of the sand (tire gauge that reads accurately down to 5 PSI, jack stand, jack, shovel, tow strap, etc.) And you need to watch a 15 minute video. And you need to pay $50 for a 7-day permit (the shortest they had.) So of course we went for it.
While Tom and Gary drove to the hardware store to get all the get-your-stuck-vehicle out of the sand stuff, Scott saved time by watching the video on behalf of our team. Just as the video ended Tom and Gary got to the permit office with $100 worth of recovery stuff. Then it was sign a bunch of paperwork, get the jeep inspected by the nice lady, and on the next step.
One of the non-essential but very valuable tools Tom and Gary purchased were tire deflators. You set the gauge to your desired pressure (11 PSI in our case,) and it more-or-less let the air out until that pressure was reached. After 10 minutes or so Tom and Gary got the tires low enough.
We had asked the nice ranger lady how often people get stuck. “Happens all the time” she said, but halfheartedly assured us that with the jeep we would probably be fine. Low and slow was the watchword. It was early enough in the morning for lots of time to call 911 if we couldn’t dig ourselves out.
We had two paths that we could take – North, and South. We went North to a lighthouse, where we discovered two houses that you could apparently rent out like air-bnbs, and a short lighthouse that was locked and closed. One building said “knock for keeper”, but after we goaded Tom into doing this he talked to a timid lady who apparently was quite fine with the isolation of a lighthouse keeper. She gave one-word answers to questions like “where does this road go?” – “The beach”… We drove off after taking pictures.
We only came close to getting stuck once. As Tom was reversing to get out of the driveway, Gary called out “watch out for the Anchor.” While Tom was nowhere near hitting it, he stopped suddenly and had to rock the jeep a bit to get started again. it was our only close-to-getting-stuck moment, and Tom handled it expertly.
We drove along the shore, seeing some driftwood art, some boats in the distance, some seals, lots of seagulls, and a few other trucks largely carrying fishermen. After an hour or so we decided we had enough and we went back to the campsite, retrieved Khan, and moved south along the cape.
We stopped for lunch at a place specializing in Seafood. Scott enjoyed a lobster roll, Gary had crabcake BLT, and Tom – who does not eat fish, ordered a cheeseburger without the cheese. As seems to happen repeatedly, his cheeseburger came with cheese and he returned it until that was fixed.
Following the advice of Andy Goldstein again, our next stop was the Cape Cod Canal Visitor Center. Asking naïve questions like “is there really a canal here” the very engaging and expert US Army Corps of Engineers ranger patiently explained the long history of the canal and why it is critical to US Commerce and Security even though it is only used by 1-3 commercial ships a day. Then we watched a good video circa 2000 by the Corps of Engineers with the same message saying it hosts 20,000 ships a year. The difference is not explained by the Wikipedia page
As we pulled into the visitor center parking lot we heard (and felt) a loud banging from the jeep. Inspecting it we discovered that one of the two arms was not latching. We tried taping it up with duct tape and that seemed to work, but still a disappointingly temporary fix for a serious problem with a pretty new (almost exactly one year old tow bar, which by the way is our 3rd tow bar.)
Next stop was dropping Gary of at Boston’s Logan airport. Kinda nerve wracking drive – particularly when a black sedan with collision damage on the rear pulled in front of us with no room to spare and Tom came within microseconds of hitting him, but was able to avoid disaster. Then the tow bar started failing again. We drove a mile or two, stopped at a gas station, and disconnected the jeep since Scott was worried that the tow bar would fail from the violent impacts of the failed latch. Scott drove the jeep following Tom to the next campsite in Salisbury, MA. Exhausted from the day’s events, we ate dinner of leftovers, and worked on the blog for a bit.
Scott did find another (our 4th) tow bar that was available and ordered it to be delivered to his niece Laurel in Concord, NH, who we had already planned to visit. Amazon will deliver it on Sunday, and we will limp along somehow until then.