This week’s dream: Boston’s charming summer playground

Everyone comes to Cape Cod in the summer – not only “WASP weekenders” from nearby Boston, but “landlocked Midwesterners attracted like lemmings to the sea” and “Californians hungry for a hit of history”. Yet despite the crowds, this long, curling peninsula and the neighbouring islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are as “beautiful” as ever, says Peter Browne in Condé Nast Traveller – and retain a “wild eloquence” that the pilgrims of the Mayflower, which cast anchor here in 1620, would still recognise. That’s thanks to the conservationist zeal of the locals and, in particular, to John F. Kennedy, who spent summers at his family’s house in Hyannis Port and, as president, created the Cape Cod National Seashore to safeguard a large swathe of the region’s mainland for future generations.

Provincetown, at the tip of the Cape, reached its zenith as a “bohemian artists’ colony” in the mid 20th-century, attracting the likes of Eugene O’neill, Jack Kerouac and Jackson Pollock. It still has a “ramshackle” charm and is home to art galleries that host open exhibitions on summer nights. From there, cycle paths wind out along the peninsula, past open salt marshes and through “shady, blessedly cool” beech forests, among grassy dunes “scented by pine trees and salt air”, and to beaches entirely devoid of umbrella sellers and other tourist paraphernalia.

The region’s “preppy” image – “chinos, clam bakes and sunny days spent under sail” – is rooted in the islands, especially Martha’s Vineyard, four miles from the mainland. Nantucket is about half the size, more remote and, arguably, more “enchanting”. With its wonderful clarity of light, its “stately, weathered beach houses”, its “iridescent ponds and sandbanks” and its little settlements with Native American names – Sesachacha, Quaise, Siasconset, Shawkemo – it is quite pristine, like a “distillation” of the Cape itself. For details, visit www.capecodchamber.org.