We continued to make Burger King our home on the Cape, venturing out to various beaches during the day and pulling in late at night to the BK once again, like a homing pigeon that got sidetracked on his afternoon delivery.
Then we headed out to Provincetown. The little spot on the tip of the Cape. The site where the pilgrims first touched down on American Soil. P-Town. One of the most popular gay meccas in the U.S.
We parked on the beach in the National Seashore, along a lean stretch of beautiful beach with a wave-less shoreline. Pulled out the bikes and headed along the beach trail towards the village, a rain-filled cloud tailing us in the sky. We stopped for a moment at the monument to the pilgrims, a small garden inset with concrete plaques engraved with various endearments to loved ones lost. (If you'd like your stamp on the first settlement, you can purchase your own concrete square and write anything you want on it, for a small fee per character....ah, sweet capitalism.)
Then we headed in to P-Town Proper. Oh my, what a place. I'm sure it's been labeled with all sorts of "descriptive adjectives." Artsy-fartsy. Colorful. Wild. Quaint. Just plain weird. Regardless, no one can deny that it is a great town to simply find an empty spot on a stoop and people-watch, for the variety of people to be watched tests the limits of the gene pool.
Main street in Provincetown.
Throngs of people crowded up and down main street. Optimistic drivers inched their way down the one-way street completely dominated by pedestrians. Tourists mingled with locals alike, in the middle of a weekday afternoon. Over half the walking crowd were walking hand-in-hand, with a guy-girl couple the exception, rather than the majority. There were children zipping around at the crowd's hip level on the latest craze: roller scooters. We saw a guy in a black leather version of the flimsy nylon shorts that joggers sometimes wear. (You know, the kind where the side slit nearly makes it from the hem to the elastic waist band. Only these shorts were made from a cow. Didn't seem very conducive to jogging, but hey.) There was a guy with cargo pants on. Not very strange, no. But they were brighter than the sun in Florida, and as orange as the fruit that the state is famous for. Oh, if only the pilgrims could see it now!
We had read about a Portugeuse bakery in downtown Provincetown that was renowned for a sweet fried dough treat that was a popular snack for the locals. We were on the lookout, and then we saw it. A teensy tiny shop tucked in a few decades ago. There were four concrete steps that led up to the door, and a large window through which you could watch the baker, a small Portuguese elderly lady, making the objects of our stomach's desire. She flattened out a wad of dough from a five-gallon bucket and dropped it into a vat of hot grease, poked it around with a stick until it was the color of perfect toast, then retrieved it with a whisk and dunked it in sugar and laid it out for display. They called them malassabas.
Making Malassabas.
Tummies growling, we walked up to the threshold. A sign hung on the glass pane door, outlining the rules of entry: "No Smoking. No Bare Feet. No Bare Breasts."
"Damn," I said to Brant. "I guess since I forgot to wear a shirt you'll have to go in and get the malassabas."
The cashier, working right behind the little lady in the window, was bedecked with Doc Martins, baggy jeans (size 82), a tight sleeveless black t-shirt and about three dozens earings perched in various facial features. Her short black hair was spiked towards Heaven with Paul Mitchell's Styling Gel, Super-Hold-So-Strong-Your-Hair-Won't-Move-In-A-Hurricane. We wondered if she was the baker's daughter.
The malassabas were fantastic. We went back in for seconds. Brant let me borrow his shirt that time so I could go in. Ha ha.
We headed back to the beach as the sky started dripping. In the absense of wind and wave, we popped up the comfy chairs and read to the sunset. Around midnight we bid goodbye to the National Seashore—no overnight parking, of course—and spent our first night on the Cape outside of Burger King property in a park-and-ride a few miles outside of Provincetown.
Sunset on the Cape.
