Soggy summer break, anyone?

It should be no surprise that I would manage to drive five hours to Cape Cod, with two small children and two grandparents confined in the car, on a day of glorious sunshine. The Littles accepted the torture with promises of the seaside, seashells, and sandcastles, and the mini screens in the back of the driver and passenger seats confirmed television’s undeniable status as the babysitter/drug of the nation. As long as the thematically chosen Little Mermaid or Finding Nemo was playing, there wasn’t a peep or complaint. Shower me with scorn if you must, but the remaining three adults in the car were spared at least four and a half hours of “Are we there yet?”

We arrived to clouds rolling in and my mobile bleeping text warnings of an imminent and virulent storm. By the time we sat down to dinner in the ever-lovely Chatham Bars Inn, a lightning storm was cracking the sky and thundering overhead while golf ball sized hail pummeled our parked car. A couple of teasing electrical surges dimmed the lights and then the power went out, apparently the first time in the memory of any staff who had worked there longer than a season, and to the consternation of new foreign exchange recruits.

Four days on the Cape, and three of them mostly soaked. When the rain died down to a light drizzle we donned kagools and sweatshirts to search for seashells on the blustery beach. Pre-trip I’d managed to come down with a little sinus infection so I curled up on a beach chair popping antibiotics and swaddling myself in half a dozen complimentary beach towels. Miraculously, the same children that can moan about blah weather days at home were steadfastly impervious to the cold, content to paddle in the choppy breaking waves and turn out a production line of sandcastles attractively pockmarked by the rain.

Since the entire vacationing population had been ejected from the beach and pool, (or vain attempts to lounge in the five minute bursts of sun), they ventured en masse into town. Business was hopping, with no sign of a recession. As wet jackets jostled in doorways, wallets were opening faster than Littlenecks at a clambake and the perpetual cha-ching of cash registers was, much like the shop owners’ faces, full of festive joy. We bought a small toy mermaid on the heels of another family buying three. Adding two sweaters and two sweatshirts to my final tally, the shop owner beamed at me and couldn’t help but exclaim how well they were doing that day. Clearly when it rains in a beach town, a little retail therapy goes a long way.

Let’s face it, the weather has been - for lack of a better word - wacked. Brits love to talk about the weather. It’s a conversation starter and, who knows, it might even provide stress relief. Our collective memory of seasonal weather is a necessary barometer against which the average day can be measured. Living abroad, Brits swiftly create new weather memory banks to join in marveling at unusually heavy snowfalls in late April or balmy Indian summer temperatures in September. So all this atypical weather is causing no end of angst. It’s the second time we’ve lured my parents out for a summer visit with promises of warm weather, and while they are being soaked in New England, old England is facing a drought; Springfield, Mass., is recovering from a tornado, and we’re baffled by the peculiar sight of simultaneous chunky hail, forked lightning and a sun-soaked rainbow. Suddenly whatever we think the weather should be doing, it isn’t, and making plans based on weather predictions is about as futile as asking a three-year old to estimate his mood a week in advance.

We tried Provincetown to lift soggy spirits but small children don’t want to shop (although they do want to eat ice-cream in the rain) and we nearly froze to death visiting the artisans’ shops on the windy pier. Luckily, Provincetown is not only known for art galleries and fabulous revue shows, it also sells a mean Godiva hot chocolate that warmed us up after buying wet weather jackets from the t-shirt shops flogging ponchos and cheap umbrellas. Everyone has a threshold, and like the dogged English sitting fully clothed on chilly pebble beaches, we’d given it our best shot. After I was woken in the night by hammering rain, I packed our bags. We ate a final Cape Cod breakfast and we hit the road. In the torrential rain.