While we were gorging…I mean din-
ing…we could see deep and darkening skies rushing in from the west, and the ear- lier talk we had heard of a severe front com- ing through played true as we beat it back to the main road and the Wellfleet Motel (always squeaky clean!) just in time to grab a room and cover the tank bags before the deluge. Timing is everything, they say. The strong front that rolled through at
dusk the previous night had left the atmo- sphere dry, crisp and cool; perfect riding weather in my book. I was up at dawn and strolling towards the motor inn’s café in search of that morning cup of Colombian go-go juice when I spotted an odd, small tar snake on the otherwise pristine blacktop of the lot. It looked oddly out of place and had a
yellow band on one end. It was no bigger than my index finger. Not a tar snake, but a baby ringneck snake, a very common and just slightly venomous coastal snake. I thought maybe the parking lot, that was soon to become very busy, was not the best place for a diminutive black snake so I prodded him a bit and got him squirming into the nearby grass. Good deed for the day done, it was time for coffee. The plan from the very beginning of this
sojourn was to avoid the crowds and heavy traffic of the summer on Cape Cod, but still it seems that folks here drive in a different rhythm, and pulling out into or crossing main roads to stay on the smaller country lanes was sometimes a challenge when dealing with Cape Codians. And I thought Rome or the Dominican Republic was tough! We particularly chose small roads that
followed, more or less, the general direction towards Provincetown, or P-Town as it is known locally. This allowed us almost totally clear and twisty roads that would run along the coast, bay and the small salt streams and ponds that dot the cape. In an hour we were hugging the huge dunes that line Route 6 near the end of Cape Cod., We parked the bikes along the tiny road to Race Point and spent some time at land’s end. Dropping into P-Town, we hoped to grab
a spot and bit of waterside breakfast. We made a quick stop at the Pilgrims Monu- ment. The tall tower stands like a sentinel above the town and was built between 1907 and 1910 to commemorate the first landfall of the Pilgrims in 1620 and the signing in
Provincetown Harbor of the Mayflower Compact. For years Provincetown stood as a work-
ing fishing village, populated with mostly fisherman and their families, but in the last few decades its charm has morphed into “le tourist entrapment” and what is now P-Town. Full of over-priced shops and far too touristy for us, we still made the attempt for a landing and breakfast, but parking is almost non-existent here, and the lots that were open wanted $20 per bike to park. We took one quick lap of the town, and I
could feel my blood pressure begin to rise as “Entitled Pedestrians” walked out in front of the bikes, texting or listening to
their iPhones and oblivious to the world. As pretty as they once might have been, I have no use for “make believe villages” like P-Town these days—let the tourists have it. We rode back out to Route 6 and stopped
at something of real note: a sign right out- side Provincetown that reads “US 6 West Bishop, CA 3,205 miles / Long Beach CA 3,652 1953 Alignment.” This is the start of US 6, which you can ride from Cape Cod to California, and I wondered how the road would change as it winds its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We did finally find breakfast back in
Truro, before heading back to the Atlantic side of the Cape and the Nauset Lighthouse.
January 2017 BMW OWNERS NEWS 65
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