Cape Cod Holidays & Accommodation
USA, North America
Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket are very popular summer retreats in New England. With their ready access to beautiful sandy beaches and quaint seaside communities, their population trebles in the summer months. You can surf, kiteboard, swim, and fish at the numerous and scenic beaches located throughout the region or go bird watching or fishing.
Cape Cod Holidays Planner
Cape Cod is nominally a cape, attached to the mainland of Massachusetts, yet it is divided from the mainland by a canal. Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are neighbouring islands. You can catch ferries to Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard from Falmouth in Cape Cod or other towns in Massachusetts. Ferry service is more frequent in the summer than in the winter.At Nantucket, you may want to take a literary walking tour. The city is famous for having inspired various American authors throughout history. Some, such as Herman Melville, wrote about Nantucket explicitly, as in Moby Dick's exploration of the New England whaling industry at its peak. Others, such as the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, scheduled a series of lectures in Nantucket's Great Hall in 1847. The tour offers a taste of Americana through some of its great literary figures.
The summer population of this area booms during the season. However, these are not the kind of tourist towns where you will see a lot of high-occupancy hotels and resorts. Instead visitors gravitate towards bed and breakfast facilities and vacation rental properties. There are plenty of resources for arranging your stay on Cape Cod or the neighbouring islands should you decide to go this route.
If you are interested in bird watching, you may want to visit Cape Cod's Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge near Chatham, where birds can be viewed year round, but especially so during migration periods. A must-see is also the clay cliffs of Aquinnah at Gay Head, where orange, red, and yellow cliffs dip sharply into the ocean. Also, you can take a ferry off Martha's Vineyard to the island of Cappaquiddick to bicycle a circuit around the island and visit Mytoie, the Japanese gardens there.
Beaches are numerous in the area, and people flock to them in the summertime. Some beaches, such as South Beach State Park on Martha's Vineyard, Cisco Beach on Nantucket, and Nauset Beach on Cape Cod are great for surfing. If you want to learn to surf, there are some great surfing schools on Nantucket. You can also try out kite-boarding if you want. Otherwise, if you prefer swimming and sunbathing, the beaches are great for this too.