Nantucket

Paddle boarding on glassy water gives me vacation brain, but I will persevere in the mission to write this blog for friends and family who choose to read this stuff. Today we are in Tashmoo Lake, Martha’s Vineyard.
We like it here!

We left Nantucket in a vacation paced hurry because the forecast was for rain, thunderstorms, hail and then some. Of course, we wanted the wind with the current, but not the hail or lightening.  Regardless, we’ve seen nothing but blue skies for the last three days, today included. Our sail from Nantucket to Tashmoo was harried. The wind was good with 14-20 knots SW, but we couldn’t decide whether to go to Tashmoo, Menemsha, or Woods Hole. The indecision made me seasick and then a really big yacht pissed us off by not yielding (both boats on starboard tack with them to windward). We are newbies we know, so we checked the rule books on this one. We were right.  I remembered our ASA instructor’s words of wisdom, “You don’t want to be the rightest guy in the grave.”

The town of Nantucket seems to be constructed to transform history into fun. Even the pump-out boat is fun.

The harbor is big and full of boats of all kinds. Mega motor yachts (and I do mean mega), a fleet Herreshoff day sailors (or look-a-likes), fishing boats, house boats, cute little Optima, and more.

All of these boats translate to great services and easy access to many things for boaters, like a Stop and Shop in walking distance from the dinghy dock where we provisioned fully for week two of our trip.

I guess I could take a sec here to tell you what we eat on the boat.  The answer (for now while we are still in the US) is the usual stuff we eat at home. We’ve had tons of fruit, snacks, tuna, mac and cheese, vegetable curry, varied pasta dishes with vegetables, fajitas, and more. We have been too lazy to break out the grill which is a shame. I think when we get to Block Island I will make a point to do that. We try hard to limit junk food on the boat as you can imagine what would happen if we had a long sail and not much to do but look at the package of Oreos in the galley.  One of us has no problem at all eating just one or two cookies, but the other has nada one bit of self-control when it comes to cookies. That was a huge tangent, let’s get back to Nantucket.

We went on a medium bike ride (visually speaking) to Siasconset.  It was worth it! An unusual miniature village with miniature cape houses dating back to the 1800s. 

What makes it over the top charming is that the owners build trellises for roses to climb up the walls and in many cases up over the roofs of the homes.

Apparently, being there at the end of June, we got to see the bloom at its peak. 

I cooled off after the ride while testing out my new wetsuit in the harbor (where I thought the risk of shark attack would be low.)

We are nature buffs, so we typically don’t lean towards the shopping districts as much as the environmental sites, but in Nantucket, the town won us over.  My favorite thing was the candy stores hidden inside the regular stores. We think this phenom was designed for kids to ‘shop’ while their parents browsed the grown-up items, but the sweeter merchandise was just what I was looking for!  We also bought a light waterproof backpack.

Date night in Nantucket included a stellar sunset dinghy ride and a surprise zero gravity experience.