Hyannis Port, the name itself, suggests so much history given the Kennedy years. People here honored their favorite son with the JFK Museum. President Kennedy's Museum and Library with all of his presidential papers and history is just outside of Boston. Here, the JFK Museum is small and more personal. Mostly homey pictures of the Kennedys with some anecdotes.
Senator Ted Kennedy's accomplishments are acknowledged here as well, but the most interesting to me was a video of Rose Fitzpatrick Kennedy giving a tour for NBC of her house and pictures and artifacts of their political life stretching back to Hoover and Roosevelt. An admirable woman who lived with greatness and great tragedy.
We walked to the Harbor, which I found more commercial than others I've seen. Many big vessels, and small cruise ships ply these waters. Deep sea fishing charters and rides on the giant Catamaran below are great.
But, I wouldn't recommend the water taxis who advertise their romantic zip around the harbor to see everything. In the ad you see four people on board. But, in reality, they look like this:
Art shacks sit next to the harbor and we visited them all. The mosaic work was beautiful and innovative.
The mixed composition mosaics had tiles, glass, beads, shells, marbles, and rocks.
David Palnick makes jewelry and his handle is
insideoutbeads.com. They're blown glass beads.
And
SeaHagSue.com.
does shell wreaths with local shells only. She was a kick. She told me building her wreaths made her hungry for all the shellfish they represented and she'd have to go out and gorge. Good thing she wasn't painting cows.
Roberta Anslow, also had a different take on photography.
She somehow transfers photographs to canvas in a skinny format. They fit in small places, can be stacked and so on. She calls them a unique size for a fat-free world.
robertaanslow.com
The individual shacks had woodcarvers, knot tying, quilt making, greeting cards and stained glass. A beautiful garden of buoys led us to the Harbor on one side. Loved it.
Nearby is the Maritime Museum. It too, was a small museum. One thing I'd never seen nor heard of before is the racing sail boats from the 1930's. They were called sailing canoes.
They were built like a barrel. The sailor sat on top and maneuvered his sail astride a wooden saddle-like seat.
Understandably, not many of these rigs survived.
The museum had 27 models of ships, and a short history of the area. It had one section devoted to pirates that children would enjoy. One female pirate and others I had never heard of before.
One thing the area doesn't lack is beaches. Yet, here it costs $15 to park and enjoy the beaches. We drove around and found several places with little or no parking where you can enter the water. One was near a Veterans Memorial Park. We stopped to see a memorial to the "Forgotten War" Korea. And a small memorial park dedicated to President Kennedy with a fountain and a view of the ocean.
Hyannis Port has plenty to do, a lot of night life, plays, art, wine, beer tasting, music and events for anyone's taste. We passed a park setting up booths and the band was already playing. The music was more the hard rock type and we skipped it. For a look at more photos:
http://picasaweb.google.com/1579penn/61910HyannisPort#
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