*FRIDAY FRIENDLY* Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket with BikeAndTheLike

Bike Friday's Customer Evangelist The Galfromdownunder reviews yet another Friday Friendly Tour for your next vacation consideration!

WHEN AN AUSSIE hears the word "Cape Cod", pointy, pitched roof houses with little square windows spring to mind. Aussie suburbia is smattered with them and, some 35 years after my mother pointed them out through the tinted window dad's Valient Charger, I ogled them first hand with Bike And The Like.

This week-long, inclusive Cape Cod trip run twice back-to-back in September, is an easy intro to this spectacularly cute and historic part of New England.

How cute? It's Carpenter Gothic gone beserk, intermingled with thick tasty sandwiches, even thicker clam chowder, lobster rolls and homespun whoopie pies. The vistas are watery, the coffee shops, galleries and homewares stores will tickle your closeted artsy literati bone. Aside from some insane car-mania, the riding is Nirvanic on wooded rail trails that link town to town.

I was a guest of the fold. In response to repeated requests for more BF-anointed tours like the Arizona Tour of Historic Towns and Hotels in March (also known as PACTOUR Bike Friday Week 3), I asked award-winning tour company Ciclisco Classico to devise a September Berkshires tour - a USA staycation of sorts. For whatever reason - probably the recession - the tour only attracted a handful of Friday folk in its initial year, so was postponed. Feeling responsible for the  enjoyment of others, I immediately consulted our Friday Friendly list and viola, the Knables offered to squeeze our little Friday contingent into their already full tour - including me!

Bike and the Like is a very special outfitter, its modest-profit business model harking from its Baltimore Bike Club roots and Roger & Suzie Knable's longtime commitment to bicycle advocacy. The couple own and ride Pocket Rocket Pros on most of their tours, especially in  Holland. No doubt due to their keen pricing, their trips always fill, with 20 to 50 participants. 

The tour package includes good accommodation, breakfasts, most evening meals and all ferry transfers, cue sheets, and despite their claims that you need to be fairly independent, quite a bit of handholding, caring and sharing, for a very affordable $985. It's one of the few tours that will accommodate quite recreational riders and newbie tourers; hammerheads will be champing at the cleat unless they can truly chill and/or make their own whoopee.

The crew is basically Suzie, mechanic hubby Roger, a van and small trailer, and a friend to help out. This time it was Jeri Jaminez, a seasoned Appalachian Mountain Club tour leader whose husband actually won the lucky draw of a BF way back in 2004 on my Cuba book tour! 

The route packs in the best of Cape Cod in a pretty shot space of time, taking in the length and breadth of the Cape and the islands of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.

Day 1 - Hyannis to Nantucket  Following a welcome dinner of a warm lobster, bib and a giant baked potato, we kicked off the tour via ferry to this historic whaling island 30 miles south of the Cape. There was much pointing and squinting to spot the 6-acre Kennedy Compound on the Hyannis shore. The famous family were one of the first to take up residence here, and have been instrumental in keeping the wilderness preserved. 

It rained. We probably didn't get the best impression of the island as a result, but its cobbled streets and quaint buildings are apparently as intact as way back when. The auto-mania was somewhat alarming to this car-free cyclist, SUV's cramming the narrow cobbled streets of the port as if it were LA.

"People want 18th century authenticity but they want their 21st century amenities," observed Glenn. Worth noting was an utterly outstanding chowder and sandwich stop half way - probably the best chowder of the entire tour.

Speaking of Chowder ... The thick, creamy, artery-clogging kind, made with a roux (flour and butter paste), which we've all come to relish thanks to commercial soup counters like at Wholefoods, is not the real McCoy. "The thin one is more traditional," said several locals. Remember this! 

Day 2-3: Hyannis to Martha's Vineyard. The idyllic island of Martha's Vineyard was named after the baby daughter of the region's English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold. I always thought it was named after Martha Stewart, and judging by the winsome ambience it could well be. It's the home of the 'gingerbread houses', the riotously colorful Methodist Church Camp Meeting Association shacks that replaced the makeshift tents of past religious pow-wows.

To get to Martha's Vineyard we rode west in a big arc taking in the peaceful Cape Cod Canal rail trail ("just like riding in France", said Sue Anderson) and south to the ferry at Wood's Hole. Along the way the Aptucxet Trading Post provided our closest brush with the Wampanoag culture, the tribe that pre-dated the colonists in the 1600's. We were shown wampum beads, the first monetary system in the USA, made from quahog or large clam shells. 

I spent way too much time loitering with intent at the various chowder stops and took a later ferry that landed in Vineyard Haven. It was a perfect gaff: the 3 mile ride around the bay to join the main group at Oak Bluffs was utterly spectacular. 

The group was distributed between three quaint hotels:  Madison Inn, Surfside Inn and Nashua House. I was holed up a tiny room with a single high bed and dressing table nook under the stairs. The sign outside said "rack rate from $67/night" - where do I sign? I guess it must be brutal in winter ... 

The Camp meeting houses are arranged in two circular cul-de-sacs, the main one being Wesleyann Grove, with a central tabernacle fit for any evangelist of the highest order.  Like the women in the windows of liberal Amsterdam, the locals are accustomed to busloads of gawkers streaming past their front porches as they sip tea and try to look olde worlde.

"Some of the folks here are in their nineties," said one owner, Joan, rocking back and forth on the porch of her lilac and buttermilk cottage. 

Rail trails galore. Much of the route is on rail trails, which means a lot of long, flat riding - up to 20 miles in some cases. This can lead to tired shoulders and necks. Move around on that bike, or better still, stop and smell the chowder!  A highlight was the triangle from Vineyard Haven to West Tisbury to the elegant town of Edgerton - all on winding, rolling, wooded trails.

Day 5-6: Hyannis to Orleans to Provincetown at the northernmost tip of the Cape, lay another must-languish highpoint. P-town, as it is called, is the gay epicenter of the Cape, a very long, artsy, gourmet,  strip of earthly delights strung along the unhedonistically named Commercial Road. A friend told me that circa 1980, the town hosted 'The night of a thousand Lizas', where upon a thousand men dressed to the hilt as Liza Minelli ran hollaring (tittering?) down the strip. I tried to google it but nothing came up. Dang. 

Our accommodations were at the Surfside Motel right on the beach. It's a place to spend a couple of days (slated for next year's tour), browsing, eating and climbing the 116-step Pilgrim Monument, apparently the tallest granite structure in the country. At night it's dramatically illuminated like the Arc de Triomphe, commemorating the first Christian colonists who arrived on the Mayflower from England. The attached museum is utterly fascinating, and that's from someone who has a short attention span for museums with copious amounts of text pinned up on walls. 

This is definitely a place to have a blow out meal - the only problem is deciding where, and what piece of art to take home and regret splurging later. I spent an obscene amount of time in the Marine Specialties surplus store fishing around in a giant barrel of 6-for-a-dollar patches. I scored a little cookie monster which will overlay a Ralph Lauren polo jock, a mysteriously ironic patch that says "Community Service Award, Scarlett Sweethearts" and an unabashedly ironic "Austin Dept of Waste Management" patch for BF Club of Austin leader Leo Anderson. It's the kind of mindless thing you do on a working holiday, right?

Day 7  - Provincetown to Dennisport via Province Lands. Three of us Fridays chose the longer, 50 mile return from P-town, via the unique Province Lands bike path carves though the dunes of the peninsula. It rained. You got a real sense of being out at the back of beyond; it was a similar feeling to arriving in Cabo Cruz in Cuba - the end of the line. 

A wonderful stop was the Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans, the kind place where you flit indecisively from counter to counter concocting a food combiner's nightmare of chowder, hot chocolate, turkey and stuffing sandwich and ice cream wth sprinkles in no particular order except all at once. We then had to really haul ass in to make it in time for dinner, and thanks to Leo's and Glenn's steady 25-27 mph on the rail trail and the superior drafting capacity of small wheels, I made it. 

Dennisport was a tiny town where our final group dinner took place at the Wee Packet Restaurant. At this somewhat belated juncture, Suzi decided to have people introduce themselves with a saying. There were some beauties: "Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things" from "quite guy" Glenn Martin,  "Pedal. Pedal. Pedal." from the exuberant, argyle-socked Matt Rawls and "Go Electric!" from David with the Bionix powered bike. Take a look at some Bionix powered Fridays here. 

Our accommodations were the Cutty Sark and the Old Wharf Inn, where owner Charlie Tobin showed me memorabilia of his father's namessake, Tobin's Toothpaste. 

"It smelled of roses," he said. 

Marconi Radio Station at Wellfleet - the man originally responsible for our insane texting! More about Marconi

THANK YOU AGAIN...

To my Friday Friendly sponsors:  Glenn Martin (also transportation), Leo and Sue Anderson (BF Club of Austin leaders), Charles Thomas (Birdy owner soon to be converted), Roger and Suzi Knable (BF supporters and a Friday Friendly tour company BikeAndTheLike.com), Jeri Jaminez (crew) and all the folks.

Support our Friday Friendly Tour Companies - because you'll be supporting Bike Friday. What goes 'round, comes 'round! 

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Charles Thomas, right, is the fourth Friday rider who sponsored my attendance on the tour - using Marti Scheel's borrowed Friday. How's that for a test ride?