On Monday we headed for Nantucket – home of ultra-preppy clothing, whaling memorabilia, and sky-high prices. Nantucket’s harbor is wonderfully inviting to boaters. Like Vineyard Haven and other New England fishing communities, everything you need is a short walk from the docks. We slid our floating home into a comfortable berth at what turned out to be the Rolls Royce of marinas. Not one but three dockhands came out to help us with our lines. We’ve been to quite a few marinas and no one has EVER offered to help with our lines before except drunken neighbors eager to show off in front of their out-of-town guests. These "helpers" invariably end up dropping the lines in the water or tying them to the wrong cleat. Telephone and cable service to the boat were offered. A handyman showed up with a drill and, incredibly, moved the ladder on the dock so it would be closer to our boat. On shore, beyond-adorable guest cottages awaited those prepared to spend $250-400 a night for the privilege of staying in a wharf-front shack dressed up with beautiful flowering vines and placards over the door bearing quaint names. ("Zenas Coffin" being an exception, although I assured my skeptical spouse that it was an old-fashioned proper name, not a death threat directed at Lucy Lawless.)
The cost of our slip ended up being equally extravagant at $4 per foot per night – the most expensive slip we’d ever seen, beating the record held by the Trump Marina in Atlantic City, where the fee included use of the hotel spa and exercise room. We decided to make the most of our night in the lap of luxury and then move to a mooring (which itself broke the ‘Most Expensive Mooring ever’ record and included nothing in the way of services!) the next day.
Our two and a half days on Nantucket were postcard perfect. Threatened rainstorms never arrived, and we enjoyed extravagant brunches, delightful browsing in the shops of Main Street, and an excellent guided walking tour of the town led by a staffer from the historical society. We visited the Whaling museum, where a storyteller gave a rousing account of the Nantucket whaling ship Essex, which was rammed by a sperm whale and sank. This, of course, was the true story upon which Herman Melville based his story Moby Dick. Melville spared us the sad story of the crew, many of whom starved to death or died of exposure (or worse, were unhappy victims of cannibalism) as they languished for months in their lifeboats.
A visit to the Historical Society proved fascinating. I was there on a mission, so my resourceful sidekick decided to research the history of his maternal relatives on Nantucket and instead found a wonderful privately printed history of his paternal family. As for me, I learned all I could about the Straight Wharf Theater, a much-beloved theater founded in the ‘40s that burned down in a fire in the mid-‘70s. My grandmother spent a summer season there directing plays, and while I couldn’t find anything in the archives about her, I did find her good friend Charles Goff’s picture smiling out of a 1959 Playbill for Hamlet. At the Peter Foulger museum, we wandered through a special exhibit on the unlucky and now defunct Nantucket railroad, an early contributor to the tourism boom on Nantucket Island that survived almost 40 years of hardship but ultimately succumbed to the elements – and the increasing popularity of motorcars – in 1917. If you purchase a package admission ticket to the Whaling and Foulger museums, the walking tour is thrown in for free – a great value!
While it’s impossible to find an internet café in Martha’s Vineyard, we found one in Nantucket at the Even Keel restaurant, who provided laptops equipped with wireless LAN cards so you can browse the net at your table over lunch. Prices, like everything else on Nantucket, were exorbitant - $8 for 15 minutes! The Even Keel serves a delicious brunch and is very vegetarian-friendly, but service is slow when they’re busy, and the waiters comically inexperienced.
One day we took our bikes to the quiet community of Madaket, on the Western end of Nantucket, and went for a long walk on the end of the island. We found shearwater nests dug into the cliff sides and had the beach largely to ourselves. Too tired to walk back, we were grateful for Nantucket’s efficient public bus system, which runs everywhere you’d want to go and can accommodate up to two bicycles on a rack on its front bumper. One evening we visited the Gaslight Movie Theater, which was showing the dark French drama "L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out)." We browsed the racks at Murray’s Toggery Shop and managed to resist buying a timeless classic, like matching pairs of bright yellow golf shorts with blue whales on them. Murray’s is the quintessential spot to buy the famous Nantucket Reds, which are pants, shorts, or even skirts in a cheery red fabric that quickly fades with washing to a signature pink. Only on Nantucket will you find more men wearing pink than women.
Biking around the island, we visited the Jared Coffin house (the oldest house in Nantucket, circa 1686) and an old gaol (sorry, jail) still sporting its original handmade metal bars over the windows.
While we were basking in the charm of cobble-stoned streets and wind-swept beaches, Mother Nature had been busy whipping up some daunting weather. So when on Wednesday morning at 3:30am we dragged ourselves up on deck to prepare for our sail to Provincetown, we found three feet of chop in the harbor (one of the most well-protected harbors in the Northeast, mind you!) One could only imagine how much worse conditions were outside it. Maybe it was the chop, maybe it was the gross injustice that it we were awake at 3:30am during our vacation, darn it! but we decided to go back to sleep, head into town for a nice brunch, and head for the south shore of Cape Cod on the afternoon tide instead – a much shorter trip.