Salt Pond Visitor Center

Salt Pond Visitor Center Review

Salt Pond Visitor Center is the first visitor center of the Cape Cod National Seashore that you encounter as you travel down-Cape toward the tip (the other, the Province Lands Visitor Center, is in Provincetown). The Salt Pond Visitor Center offers guided walks, tours, boat trips, demonstrations, and lectures from mid-April through Thanksgiving, as well as evening beach walks, campfire talks, and other programs in summer. The center includes a museum with displays on whaling and the old saltworks, as well as early Cape Cod artifacts including scrimshaw, the journal that Mrs. Penniman kept while on a whaling voyage with her husband, and some of the Pennimans' possessions, such as their tea service and the captain's top hat. A good bookstore and an air-conditioned auditorium showing films on geology, sea rescues, whaling, Henry David Thoreau, and Guglielmo Marconi are also here. Something's going on most summer evenings at the outdoor amphitheater, from slide-show talks to military-band concerts.