Road Trip Diaries

We were up in time for our complimentary breakfast, but Debbie did not take her planned dip in the sea, because the tide was out, and our private cove was a muddy flat.

After checkout, we drove into Provincetown, where Debbie bought some comfy Merrell sandals. The shop assistant was horrified by the state of Debbie’s feet, and was most attentive in finding a solution. For the first time I noticed the Provincetown Pilgrims memorial on the hill.

We had a drink at Provincetown’s Subway — chosen because I knew it had free WiFi — and I uploaded yesterday’s diary. With that, we were back in the car and on our way off the Cape.

We paused to take in the view overlooking the pretty and alliterative Cape Cod Canal, the stretch of water separating Cape Cod from the mainland.

We drove on, and stopped for lunch at The Nest Diner, an archetypal diner in Mattapoisett. Not only was my tuna melt nice, and Debbie’s chilli dogs good too, but I saw a man with an artificial arm…

We drove on to New Bedford, yet another New England fishing town. New Bedford is noted for its whaling heritage, an we visited its whaling museum. Its main exhibits are some huge sperm whale skeletons, and a half-size replica of a whaling boat.

We also saw astonishing film footage of  the capture of a whale using a sailing ship, rowing boat and harpoon, and its subsequent butchery and processing for oil.

You can’t escape whaling references in New Bedford: even the solicitors have harpoons on their signs.

On the way out of New Bedford, we saw a weigh station, but surprisingly we saw no whale weigh stations. Sorry.

We decided we wanted to sleep in Rhode Island, so we took the fastest route towards Providence.

We’ve got a small guidebook related problem. We planned our route using our bible: Road Trip USA. This offered two routes between Cape Cod and Ohio. The northern route went back through Boston, while the Southern route went through Rhode Island and Connecticut.  Given the choice between retracing our steps and bagging two extra states, we obviously went for the Southern route. Unfortunately, having worn out our first edition Road Trip USA, we bought and brought along a third edition. It seems the Southern route lost out to the editor’s scalpel (if anyone from Moon Travel is reading — either put it back, or the Route 20 intro needs editing to remove references to the Southern route).

This means that we’re short of information about the route we have chosen. Lonely Planet didn’t say very much about motels around Providence. We had to fall back on our instincts and experiences to find the motel hotspots. This didn’t go too well, but eventually we found the Bel Air Motor Inn, and got ourselves a room.

To get to the room, we had to walk around the back of the motel, in a dank area such as where junkies might congregate to shoot up in a hard-hitting Eastenders storyline. Our room was windowless and damp, and there were no bedclothes.

Debbie took control, and 5 minutes later our credit card was refunded, and we were back to the hunt. We gave up on any effort to get a motel of character, and checked into the first Days Inn we saw.

There was  a Circuit City within sight of our motel, so we had a look around, with a view to getting a GPS. There was nothing that fitted my idea of what it should cost, but while we were there we took a look at cameras — Debbie has been putting off getting a small digital camera until our visit to the States — and we came out with a nice Casio Exilim. Its zoom lens extends further than the width of the body, yet retracts flush. Amazing! It was a return, so we got a few dollars off, and there are some pictures of strangers in the memory.

Now we’re in our room, waiting for a certain Papa John to bring us one of his nice pizzas, and we’re watching American Big Brother.

Big Brother is unrecognisable. Nominations are overt, and the opportunity to nominate is a reward for winning some challenge. There is a weekly "head of household". There is incidental music. Discussing nominations is encouraged. It’s all wrong. They’ve made it more like Survivor — and Survivor was great, but Big Brother is not Survivor.

There is a nice twist: when the housemates entered the house, each one discovered that one of the other housemates was someone they already knew. Each one thought that they and their acquaintance were the only ones in this situation. I haven’t seen any evidence of any hilarity based on this twist.

Oh, and the "head of household" is following a treasure hunt set by Big Brother. All wrong.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 12th, 2005 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Oregon Trail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.