Update from the Cape Cod Canal

Now that the summer season has officially started, I spend most of my time working in the Visitor Center. Working there is pretty predictable most of the time, so I don't have many shenanigans to report. The last three days we have had groups of 50 junior-high students come in from a summer enrichment program at Mass Maritime Academy, so we have been giving tours to them. We have been getting a lot of questions about tall ships, since many people hope to see them coming through the canal. A few have come through, including one today, one yesterday, and five one of the days I was off. A lot of people ask if any tall ships are planning to come through, which is a question we can't answer, since we -- or at least, Marine Traffic Control -- don't find out until about an hour before they arrive, when they call and ask permission to transit the Canal.

This morning was the first time I led the Sagamore Hill Hike. Before it was time to leave for that, I found myself accompanying Roger and JP out to the Bourne Bridge approach to pick up a box of nails that had fallen out of a passing truck and gotten all over the street. These nails were huge -- about six inches long and as thick as a pencil, and there must have been hundreds of them lying in the road. We used two large pickup trucks and a bunch of cones to block the traffic, and then set about collecting nails. One unfortunate driver got a flat tire from one of the nails, so she had to call AAA to come and help her out. We got all the nails picked up fairly quickly, but we still caused a major traffic jam in the process. Of course, the traffic is an almost constant jam on Cape Cod anyway, so any traffic incidents -- or nail incidents, for that matter -- just make things worse.

I did get to Sagamore Hill on time, nails or no nails. It turns out that I will have an Interpreter from the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation accompanying me on each tour, which is a good thing for safety reasons. The Interpreter they sent, Sarah, is very nice, and it will be great to have her along. Today we had one visitor, so the three of us had a grand old time walking up Sagamore Hill. We even met Sam on the way, who was doing some other job on Sagamore Hill at the time.

(This is a picture of me at work on Water Safety Day. This event took place a few weeks ago, but it took me a while to figure out the size requirements so I could post pictures. I'll try some more next week. )