First of all Leo and I had a great time last night at the Roadhouse Cafe. The food, wine and music were fabulous as always. And best of all we saw a lot of friends there as well. I did have the seafood caserole and Leo ate the salmon with gusto. Cheesecake was the dessert choice for both of us. We celebrated Valentine’s Day a day early because friends of ours are coming to the Cape this weekend and we wanted to be able to spend today with them.
Surprisingly Cape Cod sees its first tourist pop of the year during February school vacation week, and we’re all watching closely to see how we do this year.
Our friends the Mathers have three boys ages 7 to 12, so we aren’t going to spend the day browsing antique stores! Leo and I decided that it would be fun to show them the Marconi site in Wellfleet, which is about 50 miles from Sandwich. We’ll drive Route 6-A so they can get a feel for the place and the shops that are available. That’s the “slow” way to get to the other end of Cape Cod. The faster way is Route 6 - a limited access highway. Great if you just want to get to work or do this every day. Then when we get there, the little guys can run around a bit and get rid of some pent up energy.
We’re going to bundle up and climb in the mini-van and off we go. Leo is an electrical engineer, so this will be fun for him. He knows enough entertaining stories about Marconi and science history to keep everyone entertained during the hour or so it will take us to get there. I like to do this because it shows another side of Cape Cod. We actually have a history of science and exploration with the Marconi site in Wellfleet and at the other end of the Cape in Falmouth we have the Woodshole Oceaographic Institution and Marine Biological Lab.
Everyone thinks that the Marconi site in Wellfleet was the place where the FIRST wireless transmition to Europe took place. But it was actually the second. (The first was at another Marconi site in Nova Scotia a few days before.) This probably is the best well known place because the transmition allowed President Teddy Roosevelt to talk to King George VII.
The Marconi site is run by the National Parks Service so there’s a lot of info when you get there. The original towers aren’t there but there are pictures. And it’s right at the beach. Marconi later shared a Nobel Prize for this invention. If you’re a birder don’t forget to look up, you might see a hawk or some other interesting migratory birds.
The Mathers are psyched for this visit because I sent them a copy of Thunderstruck
