Bicycling New England, the
Erie Canal, & around Lake Ontario 2005
Rockport to Peabody MA

June 21, 2005
Distance 29.7 Miles

Today we ate breakfast at the B&B with a woman from California; we then loaded up and headed the rest of the way around the peninsula, eventually coming back to Gloucester. Because of all the fancy houses, it was not very often that the Ocean was visible. Yesterday when we went through Gloucester, we went right through the center of town and ran into a lot of traffic. Today, our route took us around a high speed round-a-bout (which George and Jane exited at the wrong point), up a long hill and then a right turn took us around the downtown area of Gloucester. We were now along the Atlantic Ocean Shore once more. However, in the thirty miles we traveled today, we never left an area without houses unless it was a tidal flat or a bridge over an arm of the ocean. We did still see some beautiful coves and lots of boats.

Along the east coast, there is a house on every available piece of property and there are very few places where the general public can see the ocean or walk on the beach. In most places there are parking meters where ever people park their cars so they can enjoy the beaches or else there is a charge of $5.00 to $15.00 to park a block or two away from the beach and then walk the rest of the way to the beach.

After a couple of phone calls George and Jane met us for a snack/lunch in Beverly Farms once we got to Salem they stopped to go through a museum while we rode out the motel where we had reservations in Peabody. The only glitch is we had reservations on Price Line and they expected us last night. Good news they had rooms available and they accepted the rate we had for last night. The bad news is we had to pay for 2 rooms last night that we did not use. The motel is very nice and we were able to put the bicycle in the room by going through the sliding glass door out to our patio.