This morning I took the unbelievably slow ferry and bus from the mainland of Cape Cod over to the island of Martha's Vineyard.

This is a small (5 mile) island just off the coast, a popular family vacation destination.  It felt a lot like Truro on the Scilly isles, only I did not enter by helicopter.  The roads are narrow and winding and the hedges - yes, hedges - were tall.  Very pretty.

I took the ferry on foot, as it costs $140 round trip to take the car.  I learnt that it's $400 round-trip to go to the adjacent isle of Nantucket, where the billionaires live, and even if you get there you need a 4x4 with a compressor installed in order to get around: rather than using speed bumps they use metre-deep sand traps, requiring the residents' 4x4s' tyres to be deflated.  Talk about elitist!

It was frustrating to have to change buses to travel from the port to the youth hostel, using the one-bus-per-hour service.  Pretty crappy considering it's midsummer and it's a tourist hotspot.  The other guests swore to the contrary, that this bus service was amazing.  Compared to other rural areas perhaps they are right, but both on an absolute level and compared to other resorts' services, it sucks.

Having checked-in I braved the bus again to reach the tip of the island, Gay Head, where there is a decent beach with multicoloured cliffs.  Being caught in a rainstorm on the beach was very cool, I had never seen the effect of the raindrops on the sand before.

In the evening the hostel filled with 30 children from two cycling trips.  Ugh. While they were actually very well-behaved, they were nevertheless not silent, and during the hostel-organised movie night I had to lay down the law once or twice.  (I'd never seen The Karate Kid all the way through before.  No wonder everyone used to call me Daniel Son as a boy, because Mr Miagi's pronunciation of 'san' does sound like 'son'.)