Wellfleet in September = Paradise 4 Kids

September is the best month to introduce small children to the ocean. This week, for instance, the blue-green Atlantic purrs like a kitten. Gentle waves splash onto the shore. Puffy white clouds billow on the horizon. On such a day, children can feel safe at the beach. They can get their feet wet without the fear of being overwhelmed by undertow. Their enthusiasm will remain intact once they return home. And, the beach offers so many sensory experiences. There's the prickly sensation of salt water on skin, the sand sucking at toes, the repetitive motion of the waves as they roll towards shore. Sand is such a marvelous play medium. The beach is, in fact, like a giant sandbox.

Yesterday two kids, had built an impressive array of sand castles at LeCount Hollow Beach. Parents hovered nearby. As decoration, the four-year-olds had used what they found. I especially liked the spindly sponge that had been erected as a drawbridge, in vertical position. There had been numerous crab carcasses available, as well as small dead sharks and seagull feathers.

When I saw the perfect round towers, I wondered how much help the children had received from their eager entourage. The beach has been known to bring out the inner child in all of us. How can anyone resist?

In September, the seals are out, too, popping up, here and there, as if to say, “Hello. Come on in! The water’s fine.”

We saw a Lithuanian family, mesmerized by several seals. There was also a group of adults standing totally still. Camera in hand, or peering through binoculars from a distance, the tourists could not get enough of our local wildlife.

The seals are obviously social creatures, as curious about us as we are of them. They demand attention in such a jovial way. A group of us stood on the shore watching the performance as one seal dove head-first into a wave, right past a buddy who was swimming belly-up, without a care in the world.

“Are the seals eating sharks?” a tourist asked Sven.

“No, it’s the other way round,” he said. “A great white was sighted in Truro.”

On our way back, a well-tanned man carrying several beach stones, patted Sven on the back and said, “This beats the office any day.”

So true!

Many of us still have beach memories from childhood. I hated the sand getting caught in my bathing suit. I also remember sitting under our blue beach umbrella here in Wellfleet, when my brother was a baby, and collecting shells. What do you remember?

Guest-blog: My Eroded Memories of the Cape

Today, the 18th day of the Blogathon, I am happy to present Alisa Bowman, who blogs at Project Happily Ever After. Along with hundreds of her fans, I follow Alisa’s daily adventures in marriage-land and look forward to the 2011 publication of her book, Project: Happily Ever After. In this guest-post, Alisa touches on a phenomenon I have noticed here at the B&B. Often guests choose Wellfleet because of the childhood memory of a Cape Cod vacation. Perhaps the same is true for you?
Please join me in welcoming, Alisa! ….

Not long ago, I was with my five-year-old at the science museum, near where I live in Pennsylvania. She was playing with sand and water—part of an exhibit designed to teach her about erosion. “If you want to learn about erosion, we should visit Cape Cod,” I found myself saying.

Soon memories were surfacing. There I was as a little girl. I was with Dad and my brothers and we were listening to a guide tell us about the Cape and about how someday, before we grew up, the hook at the end of the Cape would no longer be connected to the rest.

That, my friends, was quite the deep moment for us kids. I believe our exact words were, “Wow.”

Let’s just move beyond the fact that the hook still seems to be attached to the rest of the Cape even though I am now quite grown up. It’s possible our nature guide exaggerated on the timeline. It’s just as possible that I didn’t hear him correctly (after all, I somewhat remember also being told, at some point, that killer bees would invade the north and kill off every single one of us before my 20th birthday).

And, might I posit that it’s also possible that this is a sign from God.

At any rate, my point is this: the memory gave me pause. It did because it was warm and fuzzy. It was the kind of memory that I could wrap around myself on a cold, dreary winter’s day.

My family vacationed up and down the northeast coast and throughout most of the country when I was young. We piled into our station wagon and drove for hours and hours. During these hours us kids frequently complained about who was touching whom. Occasionally one of us peed our pants or threw up.

Every so often Dad threatened to pull the car over if we didn’t shut up already. But, without fail, we eventually arrived at our destination, which was almost always a campground. There we would all sit on the car’s back bumper as Mom timed Dad to see how quickly he could assemble our family’s tent.

Dad hoisted tents in Virginia Beach, various beach towns in New Jersey, The Badlands, Yellowstone National Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, The Grand Tetons, Acadia, Lake George, Quebec, Bar Harbor, Rockport, and the Cape.

He was a chemist by trade, but, when on family vacation, he was the Quickest Tent Putter Upper in the US.

Mom, a visual artist, had a particular affinity for the Cape, so Dad put up a lot of tents in that area, usually in campgrounds outside of Provincetown.

As Mom spent many hours each day with her paints and her canvas, Dad took us kids to whatever activity he could find. Occasionally it was the beach, but more often than not it was a nature excursion or lecture.

It was during these outings that I learned about lichen, erosion, plovers, and various sea creatures. We learned about beach grass and about dunes. We learned about those plastic rings that came attached to six packs at that time, and how they were killing sea life.

And those are among my fondest memories of my childhood.

As I watched my daughter play with the erosion exhibit, though, I realized that I had not passed such memories on to her. I owned a tent, but I didn’t know how to assemble it.

More important, I had not taken her on hikes or nature excursions. In the seemingly endless quest to balance work with family, I’d resorted to whatever vacation time seemed easy and mindless. She’d been to the beach. She’d been on a cruise. She’d visited relatives in various states around the country.

But she had not attended a single nature hike.

Shame on me!

That, my friends, will change.

It has been a joy to meet and get to know Alexandra online. I look forward to, one day, meeting Alexandra in person and visiting her in Wellfleet. I probably won’t hoist a tent because I’m quite soft in my adulthood and have become attached to hot showers and nearby toilets.

But without a doubt I will share with my daughter the same gift Dad gave to us kids while on the Cape.

If you are hoping to do the same for your kids, here are some places to check out: Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster, Green Briar Nature Center in Sandwich, Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve.