Thursday, August 19
We are almost ready to go to Nauset beach, except mommy is still getting ready, and daddy doesn’t have his bathing suit on yet. I mean how long does it take to get ready? We are going to a beach for crying out loud, it’s a beach.

All I want to do right now is get to the beach and body surfing.
Body surfing is when instead of using a boogie board you use your body to ride the waves

Ha, the joke’s on you, Emma: Daddy was ready the whole time, with his bathing suit on under those baggy shorts. How you like me now, kid?

Finally came the long-awaited beach trip, because it turns out that my kids are beach kids; they don’t want these nice little shops, or these quaint restaurants. They want waves, and truth be told, they ain’t getting them here. On the one hand, the waves were good for Kate, because they weren’t relentless like they are down in New Jersey, where you can’t turn your back on the ocean for more than three seconds.

But to find a good wave to ride in on a day like today – 78 degrees, beautiful sunshine, no wind to speak of – you had to wait. And after only a few rides in the 2 degree water (that’s not a typo; it was frickin’ freezing), the lifeguards cleared the beach because of the unexpected presence of elephant seals along the shoreline. I surmise from various reports that the presence of seals frequently leads to the presence of sharks, and the beaches in Chatham have been closed a few times because a bunch of great whites have been hanging around. Try explaining that to kids who really really really want to go in the water, but haven’t seen Jaws. (Turns out it was a shark.)

Ok, Lebron, it was two degrees Celsius. You have thirty seconds to use your St. Vincent/St. Mary’s education to convert that into Fahrenheit.

All in all, though, a beach day is a beach day, and it was crowded, sandy, and beautiful – a no hassle day beyond the closing of the water for about ninety minutes. Mitigating the closing is the fact that the kids were treated to the sight of seals in their natural habitat. I hope tomorrow we’ll be able to go to South Beach so we can see the hundreds of seals reputed to hang out there.

We’re off to find dinner now. Chatham has a bunch of booked restaurants in it, so we’re going to try the Brewster Fish House and see what’s what. I’ll let you know if it works out. Or Emma will.

Well, Brewster Fish House didn’t work out. Note to selves: if you go to Cape Cod again, make reservations for Thursday night’s dinner on Wednesday. You see, we had tried The Impudent Oyster. We tried a couple of other Chatham restaurants. No dice. So we head to Brewster, and the Fish House doesn’t take reservations. When we saw about fifteen people in the parking lot all sipping wine or martinis, and one little group at a table playing cards, we knew we had a wait in front of us. When we saw that they seat only about thirty inside, we knew it was a long one. Given the news that we’d have to wait ninety minutes, we skeedaddled.

Two more restaurants. Two more don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Kathy checks her Blackberry, finds a place called JTs or TJs or AJs. We call and ask if there is a wait. The woman laughs. Of course not. So we walk in, and find that it is another restaurant worthy of the name Slow Death.

Here’s the good part, though. Right next door is a restaurant called Agro Dolce. Oh, the lobster bisque! (After a spoonful or two of mine, Kate wanted her own.) Oh, the caesar salad! (Emma had both the soup and the salad, on top of the bread and pasta entree.) And a very nice lobster ravioli, too. It was a real find – great food, great service, and a nice little patio on which to enjoy everything. So we got lucky.

Let’s hope our luck continues tomorrow. Auf wiedersehn.