The variety and quality of things to do amaze me. I’ve mentioned the Cape Cod College Baseball League and the Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival, both world class.
You can hear a lecture almost daily, something for everyone. Within the last 10 days we attended three talks.
At the Truro library we heard Peter Kornbluh and Ray Magliozzi talk about cars in Cuba. Peter is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington and writes for The Nation and happens to have a home on Cape Cod. Ray is one of the hosts of Car Talk on NPR. Peter has traveled to Cuba numerous times and invited Ray and crew to visit. Ray would be a lot of fun to travel with – such a humor. Here is a video of their trip. Ray really seemed impressed with the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics. JB Journeys offers a Classic Car Cuba trip – contact jbjourneys@yahoo.com.
Yesterday I drove to Chatham to hear Bill Richardson speak on the recent summit in North Korea. Richardson was twice governor of New Mexico, was Secretary of Energy and Ambassador to the UN under Clinton. He traveled to North Korea several times and secured release of some US citizens. He ran for president in 2007 and I met him as he came through Austin when I was working for the local US congressman. Anyway, I’ve always liked him and been impressed with his body of work. I read his bio and it was even more so! He has been nominated for Nobel Peace Prize three times (due to political prisoner release negotiations), and pitched on the Cape Cod league when he was in college. I was wondering about his connection to this area, but then read further and he was schooled in Concord and is a descendent of Brewster of the Mayflower. Well spoken and interesting. While he feels our relationship with N Korea is still tenuous, he feels less strain now than in the last few years. However, he has little good to say about 45’s diplomacy.
This evening I heard some Orleans history. On July 21, 1918, a German U-boat attacked Orleans, meaning it’s the only place in the US hit by enemy fire in WWI. Apparently the Germans were using their subs along the eastern seaboard and cutting transmission cables and were on the way to clip the one here. There was an audio recording from a man who worked the Coast Guard tower that day, and his daughter was in the audience. The attack took place around 10:30 am and within 30 minutes, an ‘airboat’ (bi-plane) was already here and flying over prepared to drop a bomb. The plane was to drop bombs only from 1,000 feet but the pilot tried at 800 and then again at 400 feet, both times the bomb did not release. The third try, the co-pilot crawled out of the cockpit and manually released the bomb from its casing. It landed within a few feet of the sub, but didn’t detonate. A second plane later flew over and a bomb did release, but it too didn’t detonate. Fascinating story.
How’s that for a variety of topics!
Happy Trails. blog 