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And now that this Cape Cod vacation of ours has come up, I am satisfied by a process of accounting for all other vacations during this general period, that it occurred in 1937.  Moreover, Willie and I, by consulting our memories and comparing notes, have come up with a rough outline of where we went and what we did.  Betty Cain had loudly praised Cape Cod as a place to go for a vacation with the children and had recommended to us a sort of "pension" kind of place in Chatham where she'd gone and found to be very desirable.  Also very reasonable.  Now, Betty, despite being from one of the wealthiest families in Schenectady, was as tight as all get-out.  However, at the time, not being entirely familiar with her possession of this trait, we made reservations at this place in Chatham sight unseen.  It proved to be a mistake in all respects.  The vacation was a flop almost completely.  The place we stayed proved to be an old home, not well kept up and in a less-than-desirable location.  Chatham had no beach such as we'd looked forward to so avidly, picturing ourselves basking on it in the Cape Cod perpetual sunshine.  Instead, we had two choices:  we drove to the ocean beaches north of Chatham and found them quite unacceptable because of dangerously high surf as well as frigid water;  or we could drive to beaches on the south side of the Cape on Nantucket Sound where the water was calm and warm but swarming with threatening crabs who made the water a place of uneasy recreation.  Moreover, the drives to these places were through most uninteresting territory, flat, treeless and wholly drab with here and there a very plain-looking and rather ill-kept town.  One day we drove clean out to famed Provincetown at the tip end of the Cape, thinking that at least there we'd see something quaint and worth remembering--but the town was so jammed with tourists that we literally were unable to find a place to park and had to circle through the place without stopping.  That was about the last straw.  Bab was nine and she still has fairly sharp memories of what a disappointing place we found Chatham.  The place we stayed didn't serve any meals so we had to take all our meals out and did so at a motley series of restaurants, none too great, the principal dinner spot being The Captain's Table, the name implying something quite superior to what it really was.  It was our one and only Cape Cod vacation.  The following year we went to New England but this time to the delightful Shanty Shane in Vermont which we picked out of the travel section of the New York Times.  I had begun to keep my diary again by that time and have a fine record of the two weeks as well as of our second vacation at Shanty Shane in 1939.  Fortunately, in 1937 we assigned only one week to the Cape Cod fiasco which meant that we were there only five days.  It was an early example in our experience of being extremely taken in by a friend's advice.  But, after a few more similar incidents, we finally learned to take all recommendations with a good many grains of salt.