P(arty)-town

Five days in Provincetown. What a luxury. Actually, five days of leisure anywhere would feel luxurious, but I’m especially happy to be spending them in P-town. This place has it’s own special charm, a happy blend of artsy, bohemian beach town and LGBT inclusiveness, with a healthy dose of ubiquitous camp. I wrote about this place in a previous blog post, and everything I said then still applies. You can read that post here.

There is virtually no wind predicted for the next few days, and this gives us a golden opportunity to stay in one place for a while, testing out a routine we might follow on our year-long sabbatical in the Caribbean. Rick gets busy, reading Hegel, Zizek and Lacan, and working on his current writing project. He also is having an intense email discussion with his friend and fellow Lacanian Todd McGowan, and he plays hooky from his real work to obsess about that.

 

That's our boat! (with the Pilgrim's Tower)

With all of our mornings taken up with Rick’s academia, I spend a great deal of time at my own computer. I write blog entries, look at sewing sites on the web, and read. At the moment I seem to be focusing on food, reading Crescent Dragonwagon’s entertaining cookbook, Bean by Bean, and a wonderful set of food essays by Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal. One might ask why I would torture myself so, reading and salivating on a boat with very limited galley capabilities. I guess virtual satisfaction is better than none at all.

The mornings pass pleasantly enough, but when we have time to spend in one place, the afternoons are really where it’s at, baby. We up anchor and motor over to the beach, taking the dinghy in for a stroll on the pebbly sand. Although P-town is known for its beaches, we have never had the time to visit any of them in the previous years that we’ve been here. And what a pleasure!

Seals!

More Seals!

My best Katherine Hepburn imitation

Party Float - Only in Provincetown!

The weather is not perfect all week though. We get spitting rain on a couple of days, making beach visits fairly uninviting. But this gives us the perfect excuse to have our favorite Smokey Fish Chowder at “The Squealing Pig” pub.

We also find a great little movie theater in town, and I have my heart set on popcorn – the main reason to go to the movies in my opinion – but Rick is worried about a squall that he sees approaching and doesn’t want to leave the boat on anchor unattended. So, we strike a compromise. If he insists on going back to babysit the boat, he’ll allow for a breaking of our no-movies-on-the-boat rule. Even on the way back, we break another rule by buying Campari in a glass bottle. We make popcorn and negronis in the cabin and watch the first episode of True Detective on Rick’s computer. Total decadence.

At the end of our stay we rent bikes and go for a toot around the end of the Cape Cod Peninsula. Part of the National Park system, the Cape Cod National Seashore includes a beautiful and well maintained bike path that winds through scrub pine forests and sandy terrain, ending up at Herring Cove, a broad sandy beach.

I’m not sure if we’ve answered our questions about our ability to live and work together for a year on a small boat in the Caribbean. Rick got lots of work done and we’ve both had a marvelous time, but we also totally cheated. Over the course of five days in Provincetown, we took in two movies at the local theater, ate three dinners in town, and watched five episodes of True Detective (which, in our defense, is completely addictive). We also used up ALL of our Internet data allowance.  I think this behavior should be allowed anytime, especially on a year long voyage, it’s just that we may not have the luxury of such artificial entertainment for much of the time down there in the islands.

The wind is predicted to be up tomorrow, enough to send us all the way to Portland where Rick’s family awaits. And plenty of Internet access…