Day 42: Bus to Cape Cod

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Most horrific day of travelling so far. Luckily one of Judith's housemates drove me to the train station, so that saved me a trek, but from there:
Train to NY Penn station
Walk to Megabus station
Bus to Providence, RI
Walk to Greyhound bus station
Bus to Peter Pan Bus station
Bus to Bourne, MA
Bus to Woods Hole, Cape Cod

I can safely say that American public transport is the worst I've ever been on! Also, all the bus stations were pretty shady. I soon realised in Providence that only the homeless people go indoors - everyone else sits outside in the rain. Anyway, I eventually reached Cape Cod and was met by my next host, Mike Bennet.

Mike is a neuroscience professor who works partly at one of the marine institutes in Woods Hole, and partly at a medical school in New York. At 80 he is still running marathons, and working full time. After he dropped me back at his house he left me to explore and went back to the lab to finish things off. He lives in a tall thin house on the edge of a forest, and all of one wall is glass so it's as though you're camping out or something.

Once experiments were done he came back to pick me up and we went into the town for dinner. I was famished by this point, since I had been too stingy to buy any lunch (turns out Maoam sweets aren't actually enough to sustain you for a 10hour trip). We had great fun chatting about sport and Oxford; Mike was sitting in the physiology building when Roger Bannister ran his sub-4 minute mile, since he didn't see what the fuss was about and couldn't be bothered to go down and watch. We both had quite a lot to drink and so the conversation got more animated, turning to whether you should legalise drugs, and how you should teach med students. On the way back from the restaurant we stopped off at Nobska lighthouse. There was a beautifully clear moon and you could have identified quite a few stars, if you were knowledgeable enough (we weren't). We could also see Martha's Vineyard in the distance with glittery lights.

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Photos

Providence town hall, I think
Just across from the Kennedy Plaza, where I caught the bus

Comments

[Pam]

Just buy the lunch
Next time just buy the lunch and then tell your loving aunt she owes you the cost. (It is too easy to make disastrous mistakes when travelling if you are too tired/hungry -- just think if you had had to face Washington bus station for the last leg of this day.) I am glad you had some downtime in Princeton, you can't keep going at 110% for too long! Thank you for managing to keep writing these pieces -- I do enjoy them!