'The Cape', as it's universally called, is among New England's favourite summer vacation destinations and it thrives on tourism. Vacationers come (in dribs and drabs in the off-season, and in hordes in the warmer months) to lose themselves amongst endless miles of windswept seashore. Although the Cape hasn't been spared strip malls and fast food clone-restaurants, it's not short on taste. The colonial-style towns are graceful and dignified, with many good places to shop, although you may become weary, after a while, of colonial-style bric-a-brac. Some of the locals seem to have salt crusted under their fingernails. The sea shapes history as well as geography, and the Cape's recorded history starts at the very beginning, with the Plymouth pilgrims. But the stars of the show are the perennial favorites, the sea and the shore. There is real New England beauty in the Cape's dune-studded landscapes cloaked in scrub oak and pine, in its fine stands of tall sea grass, and further inshore in its cranberry bogs, its forests of birch and beech, its meadows and marshlands.