Thar she blows!!!!

Our original plans were to leave Grafton on Monday, driving out to the end of Cape Cod (Provincetown) for lunch and then heading to Newport, Rhode Island.  But a quick check of the Weather Channel showed a 50-60% chance of showers on Monday.  You may recall from the first post how I feel about riding in the rain, so we changed our plans and left Grafton this morning.  Beautiful morning with relatively light traffic until we got out towards the end of the Cape.  And this is where our plans unraveled.....

I had researched restaurants in Provincetown and found one with excellent reviews.  We were looking forward to being able to use this restaurant as an opportunity to stretch our legs (after a 3 hour journey) and sit by the water enjoying the scenery and delicious food.  However, Provincetown has tiny roads where pedestrians have the right of way (to include, apparently, walking down the middle of the street) and no observable parking.  After circling several blocks a couple of times (and avoiding hitting other cars, people and dogs) we decided it was time to get out of there.  And so we did!  Sighh!!!

We stopped by a restaurant we had passed on the way in and had our first lobster roll.  We really wanted to LOVE it, but it was "meh". Sighh!!!

Back on the road again we had about a two hour hour ride to Newport.  Yeah, right!  Heading out the only road in or out of Cape Cod, about 5 miles from "the next turn", traffic came to a crawl - or if you a riding a motorcycle it came to "clutch".  There was never a chance to completely stop nor to move out of anything but 1st gear, with the clutch in.  Sighh!!!  We finally reached our turn, only to find that it looked, again, like Garmin had mislead us.  However, after stopping at a gas station, I was reassured by the attendant that the Garmin was, in fact, right, and she assured me that we actually would be able to get back across the road and through two lanes of stopped traffic in order to make the turn we were supposed to.  And she was right, so that was a pleasant surprise.

But my feeling of it's-the-journey-not-the-destination was again dashed when for the next hour plus of our ride we were buffeted and blown by wind that came out of I don't know where!  It's scary enough being pushed by the wind on the road, it is something entirely different when crossing a bridge and unbeknownst to me the rest of our day's travel took us over three bridges. Sighh!!!  I was riding lead (with the Garmin) and I definitely couldn't wait to get to the destination!

So here we are in Newport, so completely exhausted that all we could manage was to take a shower, eat dinner at the hotel's restaurant and crawl back to our room.  Our plan is to have more energy tomorrow!  I am also optimistically hoping that the projected rain will choose to go elsewhere.  :)