Seafarin'. And Cinemafarin'.

Whoah! Got a few things to update you on, vacation-wise. First:

Y’ever done one of those dinner-and-a-movie places? There’s one in Falmouth, where we’re staying. So we tried it the other night. There are tables of varying sizes, none appearing to seat more than 4, arranged in straight rows going from the full-sized screen toward the back. Everything is black – the soft, office desk-type chairs, the tables – so as not to interfere with the movie’s visibility, I suppose. You pay your theater ticket up front, then walk in and pick your seat. Before long, a waiter or waitress (waiter, in our case, who seemed very earnest and intelligent but somewhat flustered; it turned out to be his third day on the job) comes over to take your order during the previews. And before the movie actually began, out food was served, which seemed remarkably fast to us. (Granted, it was pub fare, which doesn’t require very elaborate preparation.) Then you sit back and watch and eat.

The good bit is that you kill a couple of birds with one stone. And what they did with the serving of the dinner, they did well; there were no glitches or hitches, apart from paying, which happened at the end, when everyone had to pay at once and no one seemed tickled about waiting around for the waiters and waitresses to get to everyone. (It would have been the simplest of matters to just walk out and NOT pay. Pretty much on the honor system, here.)

There are a number of not-so-good bits. One is that the floor in the theater is perfectly flat, unlike the risers in a regular theater. And the screen appears to be no higher than is usual. Combine this with the perfectly straight rows of tables I described earlier, and the odds that you’ll get some Cape Cod yahoo’s fat head right in front of yours are very high. And the table is of course perpendicular to the screen – I had thought they might serve you school-desk style, so as to allow feeding and watching. Nope – it’s tables that are all conventional. Makes it tough to concentrate.

Being a bit of a movie purist, this was very off-putting to me. I am at the movie to watch it, not to eat. I can’t really pay sufficient attention to either. (Luckily, and, perhaps, surprisingly, I had ordered only a salad, which couldn’t get cold or soggy with neglect. (Not more soggy, anyway.)) The other thing was that this place clearly is trying hard, but also just doesn’t put the same level of importance on the movie-watching experience that snoots like myself require. My evidence: The movie, “Brave”, was slightly out of focus throughout. Yes, I did inform them; yes, I did so several times. No, nothing was ever done. And yes, I did sit and fume throughout.

Was the movie good? I honestly couldn’t even tell you. I was so bloody distracted by their inability to either see, or correct, the problem, that I just sat and grumbled the entire time.

What’s that you ask? Did the kids like it? Well of course the !#@@!)(@ kids liked it! They’re kids, for !#@)(@# sake! What )@#($#*(& difference does it make if the @#$(*& kids liked it? “Zookeeper” is T’s favorite !@#@$((# movie of all ^#%$&* time, for !&*@#( !@#$*&!

So that was Saturday night. Sunday, the weather looked good, and since we had decided that if we were to do a whale watch, it would be from Provincetown, and since the two days after were going to be rainy, we headed to Provincetown.

The Cape, I’ll have you know, is friggin’ long. We drove from Falmouth to Provincetown and it took bloody near two hours. Traffic wasn’t terrible, though there was some kind of damned bike ride for charity that was going along the road almost the entire time once we got onto Highway 6. And in case you hadn’t heard, driving along the Cape, at least the way we went, is not at all scenic. The strip of land is so thin that apparently they had to put the highway right in the middle of it. You see the sea pretty much not at all from the time you leave Falmouth until you arrive in Provincetown at the tippety-tip.

Once you do, though, it’s very pretty. Provincetown is one of those old seafaring towns where the streets are narrow, the architecture is fanciful and a bit crooked, and character seeps from every crack in every surface. The harbor is large and whale watching boats depart from it at intervals of a couple of hours. We found parking on the wharf ($15, all day), and before we left the wharf we had purchased tickets for a 12:00 whale watch. It was 11:10. So we got directions to the closest thing they have to a pharmacy, raced there, bought and consumed Dramamine, and raced back.

Can’t say whether the Dramamine was necessary or not, because I can’t say I ever came close to feeling sea sick. The weather was perfect – the sea was glassy calm, it was sunny & hot, and the long and the short of it is that we had a great time. We saw several minke whales, which are very unspectacular, and three humpbacks, one solitary one and a mother & calf. Not breaching, not rolling and fin-slapping, as I have seen on other whale watches. But really cool nonetheless. By 4:00 we were back at the wharf, and took the kids, as we had promised to do, to the beach.

There is a beach that’s commonly used right there off the wharf, and we used it, but it felt kind of sketchy. No trash floating around, nothing like that, but to be beach-going right where they park the boats is odd. It doesn’t feel like one should be doing it, somehow. I never went in, myself, nor did Janneke; both kids did eventually dunk themselves completely, but neither seemed especially to enjoy it. It was a bit of a flop, the beach portion of the day.

From there we walked the main promenade in P-town and searched for a place to eat. And “promenade” is the right word – there were a lot of the folks P-town is famous for, a-promenadin’. Gay culture has really become central to the whole raison-d’être there, and we saw a number of flamboyantly dressed fellows biking in high heels and top hats and such. It seemed every sign advertising any kind of show or revue had a distinct gay theme to it. Including a string quartet that features four beefy guys, all scantily clad. Their name? “Nicely Strung”. It seems sort of strange, that a string quartet of any sort would be anyone’s idea for attracting a particular sort of group. But hey, P-town is the place where such dreams can come true. There’s probably an all-male gay metal band, an all-male gay barbershop quartet, an all-male gay Chinese acrobatic group. God love ‘em.

There’s a food court that’s been placed in some kind of old wharf-type structure, and we went there, since there were good options for everyone. (And I saw a Glen-of-Imaal terrier there, Robin Getzen.)

Ate at a picnic table, walked the promenade again a while, and hit the road. Adiós, Provincetown.

Back to the tent and to bed. Long day.

The following day, we dedicated to Woods Hole, a similarly sea-faring town, but more connected to the rest of the world, not being stuck way out on the tippety-tip of a peninsula, to see the aquarium they have there (the kids were excited, but…meh), and the exhibition center / gift shop for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI, pronounced “hooey”, and also…meh). But the town itself was beautiful, and touristy, but in a distinctly different way. It bustles constantly with all kinds of seagoing tourists - the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard leaves from there (though it seems a hundred years ago and in a totally different town that we took it), and WHOI seems to own every third building, using them all for labs and office space. It’s like a college town where there’s a prestigious college, as opposed to Provincetown, which feels like a college town where there’s a college that attracts a lot of dope-smokers. I got a real kick out of Eel Pond, the little bay area separated from the main bay (the “great harbor”) by an honest-to-goodness drawbridge. We had eaten lunch in Falmouth after doing laundry and playing ping-pong, so there was no consumption in Woods Hole. But we did spend a long moment lingering over and talking about the coolness of the SEA Program, which I’ll explain briefly: A sailing ship that takes a small number of competitively-chosen kids around the world for a semester or longer, taking classes on the ship with their faculty as crewmates, learning about the sea. For some reason both Janneke and I imagine Q as a marine biologist. It probably won’t stick, but we do what we can.

Home, where the rain held off long enough for us to cook out and have s’mores by the fire, and then we piled into the tent to watch “Fantastic Mr Fox”. This made for something of a late night, so we slept in this morning a bit, and now here we are, with breakfast had, chores being performed, and the kids doing some electronica before lunch. Post-lunch, we’ll head for New Bedford, to take in the whaling museum, the seaside-town loveliness, and then some Portuguese food in one of the many restaurants of said ethnicity that dot the burg, or so we’re told. Can’t do much else, what with the forecast again calling for thunderstorms, though at the moment I’m here at a dry picnic table under a gray but non-threatening sky. Still, it’s cool – my fleece was left out in the rain last night by some irresponsible ass, so while it’s off being laundered by the women-folk (not to imply that they should, just to report that they are (laundering it)), I shiver. Fate has been unkind this morning.