Cape Cod is clearly a popular place for retirees. Over the decades it has been marketed heavily as the ideal destination to live out the golden years. Many of those who move here and have their grandchildren visit them were themselves first drawn to the Cape in their youth.
Activities abound for the senior set. From golf—nearly 50 public, semiprivate, and resort courses—to the natural beauty of the Cape and the ease with which it can be accessed, retirees are unlikely to want for something to do.
As is outlined in other parts of this book, there is plenty for history buffs to digest: National Audubon Society bird sanctuaries, museums, arts, and music including the Cape Cod Symphony.
Retirees will also find the proximity to Boston a plus, as well as the health-care resources here. There is an abundance of resources for those who need to keep track of their finances: Most Boston banks and brokerage houses are represented here if online banking is not an option.
With the baby boomers arriving at retirement age, the Cape’s population is expected to continue to rise. Not everyone sees this as a good thing, but there is a certain inevitability to it. With the current and future trends in mind, every town has an active Council on Aging with a senior center. These centers provide interesting activities and the chance to make new friends.
Many nonprofit organizations also offer a great opportunity to share, with visitors and locals alike, your life experience through volunteer programs. Whether a museum, nature center, or town organization, volunteerism is alive and well on Cape Cod, providing a great way to meet others and get involved with the community.
The Cape also offers a number of assisted-living communities that provide independent-living options coupled with on-site health care and supportive services. And for those who just can’t stop working, there are opportunities, including a program by the Cape and Islands Workforce Investment Board designed to match people 55 and older with employers in need of workers.
In this chapter, we offer information about these resources and services for retirees, as well as descriptions of retirement villages.
If there is a constant on Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, it is change.
Barrier beaches roll under themselves to reveal historic shipwrecks that disappear again beneath the sand with the unrelenting pressure of time. Nor’easters cross the surrounding waters to crash in an ever-changing mosaic like the waves of bay and ocean on the shores of this 70-mile sandy spit and its neighboring outcrops. Seasons pass one on the other with comforting regularity but also with an indifference that can be, at times, disconcerting.
Quaint cottages, sand dunes, and clam shacks still exist in abundance, but even Patti Page’s “Old Cape Cod” has faded a bit, like a postcard from the mid-20th century tucked and forgotten behind a long-unmoved bookshelf. In place of the once seemingly immutable Cape Cod there is now an amalgamation of the old and new.
Trophy homes known as “McMansions” have replaced some of the cottages. The clam shacks are there but so too are chain restaurants and fine dining. Sweeping sand dunes and other picturesque scenes now compete with shopping malls and the march of development.
There are also places on the Cape and islands where even more unpleasant reminders of the modern world intrude. There is poverty and crime of every sort, although isolated and in limited amounts. The Cape and islands remain safe compared to cities and other, more urban areas of Massachusetts and the country. However, like everywhere else there are deadly accidents and occasional acts of violence, especially during the region’s two extreme states of being: high summer when the population can triple with visitors and the deep winter when, despite typically mild temperatures, life on the peninsula can be chilled and lonely.
A visitor to the region is more likely to discover the area rich with natural beauty and pervaded with peacefulness. Salt marshes shelter quiet creeks and large harbors envelop and define quintessentially Cape Cod commercial areas and towns.
Each region of the Cape and islands has its own unique personality and split personalities. Provincetown can be rambunctious and reclusive. Yarmouth is divided between historic Route 6A—the “Old Kings Highway”—and the commercial tapestry of Route 28, an economic engine that sputters at times but always turns on for the summer hordes. Sandwich and Bourne are destinations unto themselves and simultaneously home for those who commute to work in Boston and beyond.
Traditionally divided into three main areas—the Lower, Mid, and Upper Cape—Cape Cod can just as easily be taken in chunks that have little to do with the borders of its 15 towns. The side of the peninsula closest to Cape Cod Bay tends to be quieter with smaller beaches and calmer waters. On the shores that border the Atlantic Ocean, the beaches tend to be larger and wilder, the waves and water temperatures of the Atlantic less forgiving. Sheltered from the open ocean by the islands and other land masses, the shores and waters of Nantucket Sound and Buzzards Bay fall somewhere in between these two extremes.
The Upper Cape is the westernmost portion of Cape Cod and includes Bourne, Sandwich, Falmouth, and Mashpee. Mid-Cape—located, as you’ve probably already guessed, in just about the middle of Cape Cod—consists of the towns of Barnstable, Yarmouth, and Dennis. The remaining towns of Brewster, Harwich, Chatham, Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown make up the Lower Cape. Another designation—the Outer Cape—includes the Lower Cape towns along the Atlantic, or back side, of the Cape: Eastham, Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown.
Nantucket is both a town and county unto itself. Martha’s Vineyard is six towns: Tisbury, Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, West Tisbury, Chilmark, and Aquinnah, which together make up Dukes County.
Within the pages of this, the eighth edition of the Insiders’ Guide to Cape Cod and the Islands, readers will find all they need to start to explore this inspiring region. While one book can never summarize all that is available here, it is the goal of this guide to point readers in the right direction and give them the basic information they need to find the rest out for themselves. We have attempted to remove overly effusive praise for one choice or the other and, instead, recommend you use this book as a beginner’s manual and go with your gut.
Wherever visitors or new residents of Cape Cod and the islands find themselves, the sea is never far. The connection to the ocean, while tenuous at times in a world of cell phones and video games, is the heart of the region and connected to nearly every activity and endeavor that has ever taken place here.
Choose a harbor as the sun drops in the evening sky during the summer or fall and watch the fishing boats—commercial, charter, and recreational—return after a day on the water. As first mates fillet the day’s catch and tourists gather to see the action, the night begins. The smell of the ocean wafts over the parking lot, soon to be replaced by the smell of its bounty cooking over a beachside bonfire. As much as things change, that which remains is worth the trip. This is Cape Cod.
Open the pages of any American history book, and you will read the Cape’s story, from the Viking explorations on these shores nearly one thousand years ago to the landing of the Pilgrims in Provincetown in 1620. Here was the first Thanksgiving, when a peace treaty was signed between the Wampanoag tribe and Plymouth governor John Carver, and the Pilgrims gave thanks for their first year in the New World. Here, on this curved sandbar, the seeds of democracy were sown when the Pilgrims, anchored in Provincetown Harbor, signed the Mayflower Compact, a precursor to the Constitution.
The Cape’s harbors resonate with salty tales of sea captains and whaling merchants, pirates and moon-cussers. Writers such as Henry David Thoreau, John Hay, and Henry Beston have described the wonder and mystery of the Cape’s natural beauty and its changing seasons. And the glamour and controversy of the Kennedy era, of Hyannisport and Chappaquiddick, have added to its allure.
The old times may have gone, but the legacy of Cape Cod remains visible everywhere. At any town meeting you will see that the Cape’s history is of paramount importance to the Cape Codders who continue to fight for their identity, their independence, and the preservation of the Cape’s natural environment and recognition of its unique heritage.
Religion has long played a role in the lives of Cape Codders, beginning with the American Indian thanking their Great Spirit for all the life-giving gifts they received each day. The religion of the Wampanoag Indians was the only religion of the area for 10,000 years, until European settlers came at the beginning of the 17th century.