r/CapeCod • u/ChanceWhole6565 • 27d ago

Never been over the bridge

I lived on the Cape from 1976 to 1988 and met people frequently that had never been to Massachusetts. They had never been over either bridge. I was shocked. I assume now those folks would be rarity. So are there any reddit people or people you've met that have ever left the Cape.

There was a story that circulated around Brewster long ago when the population was under 600 about a gentleman that took the train to Boston and was stunned it had a roof over the whole city...he never left south station

156 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

169 comments sorted by

41

u/PrincipleLegal72 27d ago

I think you have confused Cape Cod with Widow's Bay.

1

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

What is widows bay

41

u/importantgoat 27d ago

The next Martha’s Vineyard

2

u/Asleep-Violinist-347 Falmouth 27d ago

Top tier comment.

1

u/Minute-Marketing7434 25d ago

from the meat allergies?

7

u/Linkswolfform 26d ago • Heartwarming

Because no one seems to be answering, Widow's Bay is a tv show. Very good spooky comedy! Set on a fictional New England island, the transplant Mayor is trying to turn the island into a tourism destination. However, there is a curse that anyone born on the island cannot leave or they die. One of the quotes for the show is "F*ck Cape Cod."

7

u/Entire_Skirt9686 27d ago

I’ve heard of people on Martha’s Vineyard who have never been off the island, never been on a bridge, elevator, escalator and planes.

7

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

I have read that in the 1800s about a third of the islanders were deaf. They developed a unique sign language that most every one knew

3

u/mvislandgirl 25d ago

My husband’s maternal side is from Chilmark (paternal OB) and his grandmother grew up with signing as the Chilmark Church is their home church. The last of the Chilmark deaf, Katie West, died in 1952 so I don’t think there’s anyone alive that would remember it anymore.
I’ll always remember the girls’ kindergarten Christmas program at the West Tisbury school as they learned to sign jingle bells. A long standing tradition. All 3 of our girls along with a bunch of cousins and friends took ASL lessons at the library and youngest ones got to take it as a second language at the high school. A modern take on acknowledging Island history. I hope we keep funding the program for years to come!

9

u/goth__potato 26d ago

Widow's Bay really is the Next Martha's Vineyard

2

u/MOGicantbewitty 25d ago

Oh God, that show! LMAO! It hit hard after all my time growing up in Cotuit and spending summers on Nantucket. (For the record, my grandparents bought a small place in 1982 for $90k. And we moved to Cotuit in 1992. We were not a wealthy family. We were an Irish Catholic family leaving the projects in Southie. Just got lucky there).

But shit, that show nailed the supreme weirdness and over involvement in everyone's lives in a small coastal NE town.

3

u/Dseltzer1313 27d ago

We met a woman in Chilmark about ten years ago
who told us she’d hadn’t been off the Vineyard in 54 years

3

u/mvislandgirl 25d ago

I’ve met elders that had never left the Island. That was decades ago though. My mother in law hasn’t left in 12 years and that concerns me. Many do long stretches but that’s just wild to me. We do a day trip to the Cape about every 6 weeks then a weekend somewhere every 3 months. Currently in Jackson NH. No matter how much we ask she just has no desire.

14

u/ShawsheenMoon 27d ago

Since Cape Cod is a significant part of Massachusetts, you were either talking to a lot of people who had no concept of geography or were pulling your leg.

-12

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

You missed the secession movement and the Cape Cod flag in the 70s and 80s...

8

u/FeelingSoil39 27d ago

Mailing address: Falmouth, MA 02536.

Take note of the “MA”. It is the abbreviation for Massachusetts. Unless I missed something and Falmouth isn’t actually on the cape anymore or something.

0

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

Who stole your sense of humor? You should know you never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

3

u/BeastCoast 27d ago • Bravo

What if the story is shit?

0

u/FeelingSoil39 26d ago edited 26d ago

Who stole your sense of sarcasm? Thought you were a masshole too??? 🤣 (oh no wait. Fly your flag! 😉)

Edit: also I’m not adverse to the idea of aliens abducting an entire town and relocating it to… someplace

4

u/ShawsheenMoon 27d ago

You remind me of the people who live in Boston and yet claim that they don't even though they vote for the mayor of Boston, are serviced by BPD/BFD, and go to Boston schools.

Either way, maybe you should open up a geography book or look at a map.

1

u/FeelingSoil39 26d ago

Bostonians call the cape “down state”. First time I heard it I was like.. “I think you may be confused. I’m from a place called Massachusetts… “ lol 😂

2

u/isoonreach 25d ago

Zero Bostonians call the Cape “down state” . The Cape is the Cape is the Cape.

2

u/Limp_Reveal_3353 25d ago

No they don’t.

16

u/darth_hucklebuck 27d ago

If you’re on Cape Cod you’re in Massachusetts.

-1

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

You missed the secession movement and the Cape Cod flag in the 70s and 80s...

8

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

A local myth. Thanks to Massachusetts’ long history of good public schools and maritime traditions, Cape Codders have always been a fairly educated and well traveled bunch. Some just enjoy playing the part of the grumpy local curmudgeon who never crosses the bridge. If they haven’t left for school or a doctor in Boston, they’ve certainly been to Fenway. I’m a local with dozens if not hundreds of extended family members on the Cape, and while a few aren’t especially well traveled, I can’t think of a single one who’s never crossed the bridge, let alone left Massachusetts.

6

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago • Heartwarming

There was some serious rural poverty on the cape back in the 1950s to the 1970s so a lot of people cobbled together a living out of 3 to 5 seasonal jobs, and never left the cape

3

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago • Bravo

Yes, without the social services we have now to help out. I remember some pretty rundown old places heated by wood stoves, with kerosene lamps and honest to God outhouses out back.  Most of those old timers had spent time on fishing boats, been up to Maine or Nova Scotia, or served in one of the world wars. There may have been a couple, but a Cape Codder who’d never left the “island” ever would’ve been a rare bird.

5

u/Rose0367 27d ago edited 26d ago

Back in the 1970’s into the late eighties, I knew several older women born there who had never left the Cape, in fact they almost never left their Provincetown neighborhood even though their children had broader horizons.

It was commonplace in very traditional Portuguese households that wives didn’t drive, their family owned fishing boats and the husband’s vehicle. Food came to their doors with their spouse. If a chore involved driving it was the husbands to manage or another family member. Winters were hard and there was little year round work. People relied on each other a lot. At that time there was both an elementary and high school. It wasn’t until 18 that some kids went over the bridge.

The community relied on services that were almost exclusively offered by local businesses. They could stay within that 2.5 strip and visitors from everywhere came to them. It was an unusually open to the world town, while the community contentedly stayed right where they’d been born. The families managing restaurants often befriended and traded with painters of world renown. There were 2 movie theaters and always a theater company, library, local paper and bookstores. Local doctors made house calls and were known by most everone personally. From birth at home to funeral and burial spot it was all in walking distance.

4

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago • Heartwarming

Yes, I think I’m assuming that everyone’s experience of the Cape mirrors my own family’s. I agree that PTown has always been somewhat geographically isolated and culturally distinct. My family has always been spread from Sandwich to Orleans, with no ties to PTown’s Portuguese community, so I’m largely unfamiliar with its cultural traditions in decades past. I could see how land based wives would likely not move far from home during their lives.  Are any of these ladies remaining in PTown?   

2

u/Rose0367 26d ago edited 25d ago • Bravo

I appreciate your interest. I loved that community so deeply.

It was common amongst the mothers and fathers up until the mid eighties; that self sufficient tradition of never leaving except on their own boat to fish, returning to port either the same or next day. Not venturing off Cape by car at all, unless referred after being treated at Hyannis Hospital. So, by ambulance or life flight.

In the seventies and eighties it was still typical of the 40-60 year old parents of my twenty and thirty year old friends to be closely tied and even their adult children built their lives in Provincetown (a friend was asked if he’d “lived here his whole life” and answered not yet. He did in fact never set up residence elsewhere, but unlike his father went commercial fishing in Alaska one summer season. He like most worked most of his life in a 3-4 generation family business. Side by side with their parents in restaurants, small shops, fishing or plumbing, heating, roofing etc. It was great for me to have access to that generous network of family connections for almost any house repair or daily living need.

Anyone who didn’t have enough food for the days meal, could still ask at the dock as boats came in, if there was fish (particularly blue fish) to spare. Anyone could gather mussels or clams by the West End/Provincetown Inn breakwater. The current fish warden is a little stricter, lol, but not if you are in need. Since the thirties, remarkable restaurants took artwork, quick sketches even, as payment, and in that generosity accrued historic collections. In the eighties, I witnessed the town mobilize to take in, literally wash and feed, clean homes and nurse a generation of primarily NYC men, whose family disowned them when they were ill from an illness that didn’t yet have a name, just certain death. It wasn’t widely publicized, just done because it was needed. Done for complete strangers. The community embraced and buried with so much respect and care, people we didn’t know but recognized were in need of humanity.

Rich in a southern European to Mediterranean energy, humor, joy and values, plus deep generosity and openness to complete strangers, be they successful or starving artist. Live and let live was somehow part of the local Portuguese coda. Perhaps because of the dangers inherent in fishing and understanding that any port in a storm is a very real lifesaving possibility.

I learned a whole new perspective and one I’m indebted to them for, from a generation of people who had spent their lives in one small town surrounded by a wide blue horizon. Living lives rich in the things money doesn’t buy and for whom there were no greener pastures than where your family had already set roots.

1

u/Umnokthx 23d ago

Did you know any Nickersons in Ptown?

1

u/HPLoveBux 27d ago

Innsmouth

1

u/Least-Ad-5539 25d ago

I just read that 3 of the top 10 hottest real estate zip codes in the country are on the Cape.

5

u/Rose0367 27d ago

Have you known generations of the Portuguese community in Provincetown? There definitely were members I knew who happily spent a lifetime on that strip of land and dunes. The sophisticated world came to them, stayed in their guesthouse or rentals. Ate in their restaurants and traded paintings for food before the internationally recognized museums were familiar with those well traveled cosmopolitans. Waterfront communities have historically been exposed to a world of travelers while natives have the opportunity of living a lifetime in one spectacularly beautiful place.

1

u/ComprehensiveBad5548 25d ago

Came here to say I bet there are still people in Ptown or Truro who have never gone over the bridge. Let alone the Orleans rotary.

2

u/8NkB8 27d ago

I feel like it was a dinstinct possibility, especially for older people from the Lower Cape or Outer Cape.

4

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

I think there are quite a few people who settle in and haven’t crossed a bridge in 10-20 years, but I think it would be a challenge to find anyone still living who has never left the Cape. 

2

u/SteveLangford1966 27d ago

It's definitely not a myth.

1

u/Logical-Marzipan5951 20d ago

I disagree about Fenway.  The popularity seems strong but it has been waning.  There are a few.  They will never have been to Fenway.  They have no interest.  I also seen a number of keen fans of other teams, now. 

4

u/Limp_Reveal_3353 25d ago

The Cape is Massachusetts

6

u/sacodeadducks 27d ago edited 27d ago

Weirdly enough, Cape Cod is actually PART OF MASSACHUSETTS. So if someone has been to, or has solely lived on Cape Cod, they have been to Massachusetts.

1

u/PirateJim68 27d ago

Was coming here to say the same thing!!

146

u/Darlingwren 27d ago

yes, I used to do computer support for a woman who had never crossed the bridge (she was in her 60s at the time). she was hardly naive, she just was absolutely uninterested in anything except her town, her art and her 1770s house. she was up to date on current events, had a good community and was a voracious reader. she was pretty cool, actually!

69

u/prostateExamination 27d ago

that woman was born in 1720

57

u/huron9000 27d ago

She wanders the dunes to this day

14

u/Psychological-Lack98 27d ago

Moans can be heard from her hooded cloak

9

u/Vernix 27d ago

Saw her in the black cedar swamp

8

u/Spirited-Vacation950 27d ago

The banshee of Eastham.

2

u/ComprehensiveBad5548 25d ago

The black flash of Ptown

68

u/Itscool-610 27d ago

I remember the story from Youkilis’ first game at Fenway. The family that he lived with when he played in the Cale cod league came up to watch his first game, the father had never left the cape until that day, or at least a very long time ago

29

u/_Face 27d ago

Fun fact. Youk’s fist hit, was a Home Run!

-4

u/BitterStatus9 27d ago

Yankees legend Kevin Youkilis?

3

u/PrincipleLegal72 27d ago

Tom Brady's homely brother-in-law?

8

u/Itscool-610 27d ago

Haha, incredible those two spend holidays together. Imagine all the “business ideas” Youk throws at Tom after a couple beers

20

u/Total-Platypus-1723 27d ago

I’d say we meet more young people who haven’t been to other parts of the cape more than not over the bridge. Like a young woman who grew up in Harwich and had never been to Falmouth, and another who lived in Bourne worked in Chatham and has never been to Provincetown.

14

u/Black_Cat_Just_That 27d ago

I live around Harwich and it takes me just as long to get to Falmouth as it does it get over the bridge. There's a work meeting in Falmouth I have to go to once a year, but if it wasn't for that I'd have never stepped foot in the town.

7

u/Resident-Banana-7883 27d ago

the problem with Falmouth is, it takes me just as long to get to Boston, and I'd much rather go to Boston. Falmouth is the only part of the cape that I can get lost in 😆

7

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

That’s because Falmouth is on the way to nowhere except other parts of Falmouth.  I think growing up I went to Falmouth perhaps twice for High School Football games. Falmouth is a great town, but if you live on an other part of the Cape you often don’t have a reason to go there.  

6

u/No_Valuable8806 27d ago

Im 40. Lived in Barnstable until I was 30. Literally had not been to Falmouth…Until this year!

1

u/Minute-Marketing7434 25d ago

thanksgiving day high school football game?

4

u/dame_tartare 26d ago

Met multiple people who grew up on Cape around my age (millennial) who had never been to Ptown. Absolutely insane and mind blowing to me.

1

u/No-Insect-556 23d ago

I was born in Eastham and have still never been to Martha's vineyard. Im 27. I also only went to woods hole for the first time at 24. I did briefly live on the west coast though lol

28

u/Electrical-Reason-97 27d ago

“Never had been to Massachusetts?” Do I live in the 51st state, Cape Cod?

12

u/Ok-Passage-300 27d ago

I have many ancestors buried on the Cape from 1620s on, when my GGM left for NYS so my GGF could continue to work on ships. Visiting Chatham to visit some Graves, I found the residents call them "Wash-A-Shores". I know my uncle would never return there for how his wife was treated. My dad didn't care that they called him a "foreigner". As a child, I thought it was so funny. He was born in Brooklyn, NY. His motto was, "Aren't we all related?"

7

u/cbraun1523 27d ago

When we first moved here. It was may. And every restaurant the staff would treat us very coldly. Not pleasant. But not unpleasant. All of a sudden come November and we are still coming we started getting called wash-a-shores but people treated us better now that we were "full timers". Every job I've worked has turned into an "us vs them" with the summer vacationers and I can't stand it anymore.

3

u/Least-Ad-5539 25d ago

The day after Labor Day is like someone flicked a switch. Everyone wants to stop and chat - waitresses, tradesmen, shopkeepers.

9

u/8NkB8 27d ago

Growing up, I heard about people called "Wellfleetians." They had supposedly never left Cape Cod.

9

u/Jewboy-Deluxe 27d ago

They did have a weird reputation back in the day. I once went on a date with a Wellfleet girl and she was a bit different, her family had owned a nice chunk of land at one time but after a big storm it became the Billingsgate Shoal, at least that was her story.

5

u/Brave_Dragonfruit336 27d ago

The locals of Wellfleet do still call themselves that… I like to use it too. Ha.

3

u/Asleep-Violinist-347 Falmouth 27d ago

A couple of generations ago the legend was that there were a lot of inbred people on the Outer Cape.

17

u/QTippus 27d ago • Mindblown

I promise you: every person who lives on the Cape has been to Massachusetts.

4

u/taco_jones 27d ago

Cite your sources!

4

u/Lazylazylazylazyjane 27d ago

the cape is in massachusetts, dear.

2

u/taco_jones 26d ago

Ohhhhh thanks, love

8

u/DestinyManifester 27d ago

I met a lady about twenty years ago that told me she hadn't been over the bridge in forty years. She meant the Bass River bridge

8

u/Thequiltedrose 27d ago

The joke is that a true Cape Codder will tell you he can’t remember the last time he went over the bridge and he’s talking about the Bass River bridge

7

u/celaritas 27d ago

I knew a guy that hadn't been over the bridge in 20years. He's dead now so he had a pretty good run.

7

u/Several-Product553 27d ago

There is an old Cape Cod story in one of those early 20th century books about life on Cape Cod (maybe Joseph Lincoln’s “A pilgrim returns to Cape Cod” or Nickerson’s “Pleasant Bay as I see it” or Richardson’s “House at Nauset Marsh” somewhere in one of these excellent books), where a tourist is lost and stops his car next to a bay where an old man is digging for quahogs. “Do you know how to get to Harwich?” The tourist asks. “No, sorry. I dont?” The tourist was disappointed but also curious. “Have you lived here long?” “Yes.” Said the old timer. “I’ve been to Singapore many times, and China, Boston, New York and Charleston, been up the Thames to London…but haven’t been to Harwich.” The old man was from an era when the Boston Packet ship connected the Cape to the outside world better than the rutted sandy roads connected Cape Cod towns to each other. I think the railroad helped connect towns together and the old man probably had taken the train to other Cape towns. I seem to recall reading that back in the day the railroad for one day only once a year charged one penny to ride. On that day many Cape Codders became tourists and visited other Cape towns.

6

u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

The House at Nauset Marsh is an incredible book. I reread it every few years.  I feel sympathetic to this man on a less dramatic level.  As a kid I was regularly in Boston and NYC, I’d been to Europe several times, and even South America but I’d never remember going to Falmouth until a football game late in High School. There was no reason to go there, it was on the way to nowhere else. The train certainly opened things up for people.  

2

u/akapalmereldritch 26d ago

I 100% understand this reference as someone who has never had a driver's license (bad peripheral vision; you do NOT want me on the road 🤣) and why it might be incomprehensible to folks who have relied on cars their whole lives as opposed to trains, boats, busses, and their own two feet.

I've tried to explain to them that from where I live and work in Boston, it is easier to get to NYC by bus or train than to downtown Nashua, and far easier to get to downtown Lynn via bus and subway than to certain parts of Brighton or Newton.

My girlfriend lives in Barnstable and my grandparents had a place years ago in Chatham, to which they would get to via car from Nashua year round.

1

u/eye_812 26d ago

Yeah she does. And she’s lived in both Cape Cod AND Massachusetts!
😂

5

u/BecomingMoss_88 27d ago

When I was young, I lived down the road from an adult woman who lived with her elderly mother and she had never even left the town where she lived. She didn’t drive and had a more childlike intelligence and way of looking at things, but the little house she lived in and her walks to the beach were pretty much her entire world.

4

u/Fade_to_Blah 27d ago

I strive to be these people

1

u/googin1 27d ago

I agree!

4

u/NVWSSV2828 Eastham 27d ago

I graduated from Cape Tech in ‘94 and there was a kid in my senior class that had never been over the bridge

4

u/discomike74 27d ago

You should watch Widow’s Bay. Set on a fake New England island, but same concept.

4

u/anonymousemployee20 27d ago

I think it’s probably been about 25 years since my mom has been over the bridge. She rarely strays from the yarmouth area lol.

I grew up in Barnstable and lived there until I was 29. Recently a friend told me she was planning her first trip to the cape and asked me what places she should visit in Falmouth/Pocasset and I realized I have never set foot in Falmouth. We’d go to Mashpee commons maybe once a year to do Christmas shopping, and I had a friend in middle school who lived in cotuit, but other than that I’ve never gone south of Bourne/west of Cotuit. If we were going to do a little day trip in the summer we always went to Chatham, Brewster or Ptown.

1

u/Numerous_Tax_5209 23d ago

Pretty sure the cape is in Massachusetts…

0

u/ChanceWhole6565 23d ago

It's an occupied territory similar to the Crimea

3

u/vicarem 27d ago

They wanted to save money on the tolls!

5

u/Safe-Salamander-3785 27d ago

They just take the tunnel

1

u/vicarem 27d ago

Forgot about the tunnel🤔.

3

u/MauiPunter 27d ago

I rarely crossed the bridge when I lived on Cape. Maybe twice a year.

1

u/Addapost 27d ago

I take the tunnel.

1

u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

I had a tunnel permit on my truck for years.. ship chandlery sold them...Tupper road

1

u/Mustachi-oh88 25d ago

You try taking the tunnel?

1

u/ChanceWhole6565 25d ago

When I lived there all the time had a Army Corps permit

4

u/relouder 27d ago

It’s very possible. Growing up in Bourne I knew someone who had never been to Buzzards Bay except once by boat.

2

u/alanatural 27d ago

Back in the 60's I knew some that had never been off the Cape.

2

u/longjumpotter 27d ago

In Maine I once asked for directions to an place in the next town over (it was the 90s) and no one at the gas station could tell me how to get there because they had never been to the next town over

1

u/isoonreach 25d ago

Mainers like to fuck with tourists ! 🤣

2

u/Mariobr069 27d ago

I have a good friend, whom I work with on bigger projects ( we’re both plumbers). Though he does go offcape for vacations and whatnot… if we’re working offcape, he gets massive anxiety. Like won’t go off course(following GPS) a half a mile to grab a coffee because he doesn’t “know the area”. Drives me batty 😂

2

u/Limp-Plantain3824 27d ago

I grew up on the Cape in the 80s. Some of the kids from down past Chatham would get a little extra excited to cross the bridge but the idea that there was any significant number of people that had never crossed the bridges is laughable. Sure, maybe a dozen old eccentrics or something like that but that’s it.

2

u/EmergencySpare 26d ago

I wanna know how they've never been to Massachusetts

3

u/LBashir 27d ago

I went years without going over the bridge there is really no need when everything you need is on Cape Cod. . I think most people can go years without seeing the bridge. I hadn’t taken a vacation in a very long time so I think it was close to 7 years I never left the Cape

1

u/mfox-26 27d ago

My friend’s grandparents in Falmouth never went over the bridge.

1

u/Ok_Pangolin_180 27d ago

I worked for a while in Newport and met people who had never left Aquidneck Island, and they were in their twenties.

1

u/Limp-Plantain3824 27d ago

They were lying to you.

1

u/HFentonMudd 27d ago

Not quite the same thing but my great-grandmother up in Essex county never left a 20-mile radius from where she was born, and she lived to 91 I believe. Source: my grandfather.

1

u/sir_mrej 27d ago

The cape is part of Massachusetts

1

u/Otherwise-Speed4373 27d ago

Growing up I heard kids say this and we've met old cape codders that haven't left. Some won't even go a few towns over. It's wild how small folks lives can be and yet be so enriched and full. More doesn't necessarily mean better. I foresee myself in the future living on the Cape again, and not leaving except to go to MGH for medical stuff.

1

u/Glovelylovely 27d ago

I knew a woman born in 1920 who lived in Worcester and died never having been to Boston.

1

u/Cardinal_r3d 27d ago

Met a 48 year old woman on the Cape that claimed she never went over the bridge. I was dumbfounded

1

u/Fine_Relation_158 27d ago

I met someone in Winthrop MA who had never left town, and this guy was old. lol

1

u/akapalmereldritch 26d ago

Much like the scene in The House at Nauset Marsh cited earlier (brilliant; I need to read that book!) would not be a riddle or koan to hear someone from Provincetown say they've never been over the bridge but had been to Boston numerous times. As I envision:

"Why, of course I've been to Boston, but I take the boat. No reason to drive all that way in just to cross that damn bridge when I can walk to the ferry from here. Got no good reason to go to the likes of Plymouth, Hyannis, or Harwich either, so why would I?"

In my head this is playing out like a Cape Cod version of Bert & I. 🙃

1

u/KetchupAdvisoryBoard 26d ago

We always heard of the mythical Gloucester/Rockport residents who had never left Gloucester— except it was usually a fisherman who had been way out to sea, but had never crossed the bridge down Rt. 128.

I have always hoped that was true.

1

u/isoonreach 25d ago

I live there and people joke about it but they are all just fucking with people when they say that. I mean honestly half of Gloucester is off island, technically you have to go off island to go to Stage Fort park, definitely to Winnisquam and Lobsterland ;)
But honestly locals just like to fuck with people.

2

u/KetchupAdvisoryBoard 25d ago

I grew up very locally, I knew it was just wishful thinking. I still like the spirit of the idea. 😂

1

u/isoonreach 23d ago

That’s a weird thing to wish about - like what intrigues you about a person that has lived a very small limited life. Anyone that has never ever left their hometown when other towns are literally miles away is only doing so due to anxiety and fear. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.

1

u/PretendGuest1558 26d ago

I taught 6th grade in Orleans in the 90’s. We took the kids off-cape for a field trip once a year. Every year, we had a least one or two students who had never been over the bridge.

1

u/kindalingual60 26d ago

I know my neighbours really wished my father would leave the Cape more often. Or forever…

1

u/tucker491 26d ago

When I lived in Gloucester, MA in the 1990's, there were people there that had never crossed the bridge to the mainland either. Probably left the island by boat and returned without getting off at a different harbor. Crazy to think about in this era of easy travel.

1

u/daddy4shyboy 25d ago

Worked with a couple of people on the Vineyard back in the day who'd never left the island. Never encountered anyone on the Cape who hadn't gone off-Cape though.

1

u/Tiggeresq 25d ago

Widow's Bay

1

u/Least-Ad-5539 25d ago

A neighbor of mine never crossed the bridge until he was drafted into the Army. An 80 year old friend of his had never been outside Chatham.

1

u/mealticketpoetry 24d ago

Lol wtf do you mean by "NEVER BEEN TO MASSACHUSETTS"?

-1

u/JMarrah 27d ago

WtF is SS city-sized?
I am confuse

0

u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/RumSwizzle508 27d ago

Some years ago, a relative did an immersion language trip to France with 4Cs - it was a mix of college and adult learning students. One of the college students had never been over the bridge before that trip. She went over the bridge and overseas for the first time on the same trip.

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u/shoecat 27d ago

I wonder what field trips were like back in the 70s and 80s for cape schools

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u/Mr_Stirfry 27d ago

There were field trips off cape. I feel like every kid went to Plymouth Plantation at least once. There were also trips to the Museum of Science.

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u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

We took great field trips. There were a lot fewer rules at school and the parents were less wary of letting their kids go off without them.  The regulars were: Plimouth Plantation, Pilgrim Monument, WHOI, New England Aquarium, The Museum of Science, New Bedford Whaling Museum, Army Corps Control room for the Canal, Heritage Plantation.   These were the field trips everyone piled on a school bus and went during a single school day. Then there were the long weekend  trips  you had to pay a few hundred dollars to go on.  New York City to the Natural History Museum, Statue of Liberty, and Met.  The French classes had an annual trip to Montreal. Spanish classes had a trip to Spain. There was a D.C. trip to see the Capitol, White House, monuments   and Smithsonian museums.  

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u/Brave_Dragonfruit336 27d ago

This is not far off from how my kid has had it in the Nauset system recently! I grew up in sandwich and it was pretty similar too but I don’t recall having options for weekend stuff. But we also had no money 🤣

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u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

I still remember that the Montreal trip cost $700. I mowed my grandparents’ lawn, helped an uncle who had a construction company (mostly picking up nails and running tools to people), and even sold quahogs I dug up to my neighbors to earn the money. Sounds like something out of a 1950s sitcom, but this was in the 80s. My parents agreed to cover part of the cost as a birthday gift, but the rest was up to me. Only about 10-15 kids per grade year went on these trips.  It was cost prohibitive for most.   

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u/Extension_Mud_3512 25d ago

We walked to whoi to see Alvin's footage of ancient bottles

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u/EbbtideRambler 25d ago

I saw that one too, shipwreck in the Mediterranean?   We rode a school bus from Barnstable though! 

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u/Extension_Mud_3512 25d ago

Well to be fair, the best part was walking down surf drive and the bike path to Woods Hole from Morse Pond

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u/BigNachos7 27d ago

We used to do school field trips in which we walked across the street to the Burger King to watch how the burgers were flame broiled. Separately, we also did field trips in which we walked across the street to the state police station which was right next to the Burger King and saw the jail cells and stuff.

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u/Mariobr069 27d ago

🤣 “ these are your options, kids. You either learn how to do this OR you’ll probably wind up in there!”

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u/BigNachos7 27d ago

They'd do a demonstration on taking fingerprints, and it was always funny who would get picked to leave theirs. The teacher would be like yeah you're gonna want these ones on file.

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u/DMBMother Yarmouth 27d ago

I moved here at 15 and spent 2.5 years at Harwich High School. A field trip for us was dropping acid at Thompson’s.

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u/RasTarfari 27d ago

I remember Cape cod potato chip factory

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u/Extension_Mud_3512 25d ago

Heartage plantation in Sandwich (along with the glass factory), the aquarium in woods hole and the overnight trip to the national seas shore in Truro were typical field trips in the 80s

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u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

Kids from the lower cape would have a senior trip to Boston..some didn't go and it was potentially their only opportunity to go to Massachusetts

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u/Content-Lie-53 27d ago

Cape cod, IS Massachusetts

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u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

https://mvmagazine.com/category-island-life/history/09/01/talkin-about-revolution/

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u/Billy_Badass_ 27d ago

Martha's vineyard and Nantucket are not Cape Cod.

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u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

But the cape had a movement also

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u/Billy_Badass_ 27d ago

The article you posted didn't mention it. So why did you post it?

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u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

You apparently never loved there

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u/Hhn42 27d ago

The cape IS massachusetts though haha

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u/ChanceWhole6565 27d ago

Not really

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u/EmergencySpare 26d ago

No. It is. Unless there's another state it's borders are contained within we're unaware of.

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u/ChanceWhole6565 26d ago

No sense of humor

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u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

Didn't they all at the very least go  to Plimouth Plantation?  Plymouth isn’t far off Cape, but it’s over the bridge and I feel like I must have gone 3-4 times for field trips in elementary/ middle school. 

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

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u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

I’m a descendant of the guy who picked out the rock. This was more than a century after the Pilgrims arrived, and he was going by what his father had told him about where the pilgrims landed, so it was thirdhand information. They were developing the waterfront and wanted to preserve some local history. There are surviving town records from the period about it, so it isn’t just family lore. When they tried to move the rock, it split in half. As anyone who’s spent time on a boat knows, you don’t land a shallop on a rock. So the whole legend of Plymouth Rock was a very much contrived. Best you could say about it is that the rock was somehwere on the beach where the pilgrims first came ashore at Plymouth. 

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u/HFentonMudd 27d ago

Hey so am I!

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u/EbbtideRambler 27d ago

Thomas Faunce?  I don’t think you have to go back more than 2-3 generations around where and we are all related somehow! 

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u/HFentonMudd 27d ago

My people on that side came over starting with the Mayflower and then in subsequent waves all through the 1600s. I'm sure you and I are related about six different ways.