Salready on the highway, Route 6 heading north, the feeling of freedom is suddenly there. The Cape Cod peninsula juts out into the Atlantic like a bent arm, and roughly at its elbow you cross an invisible border. From now on, there are no more big supermarkets, only pine forest and salty wind, kayaks and surfboards swing on car roofs. Once you have reached the drive-in cinema from the 1950s, the village of Wellfleet begins, founded in 1763. Surrounded by the sea, the land is only two to four kilometers wide in some places. People used to live from whaling here, today from oysters.
The historic town has a good 3,500 inhabitants, and the number quintuples in summer. However, you will look in vain for everything that makes up the Hamptons: swanky cars, public nightlife, skating shows, manicured gardens. Creative people who are looking for peace and quiet come to Wellfleet. The New York Times described the audience years ago: “The entire faculty of Columbia and Harvard, the staff of the Paris Review and the New Yorker, and half the psychoanalysts of the Upper West Side.” To them heaps of galleries, a theatre, the bookshop with an adjoining restaurant and three cannabis dispensaries await. Also a French bakery, in front of which there is a 15 meter long queue at the weekend.