Waypoints | STOPS ALONG THE WAY
Martha's Vineyard: KMVY, K1B2
For an idyllic excursion this summer, try visiting a nip of land just off Cape Cod that is best known for casual elegance and historic charm—Martha’s Vineyard.
You’ll find plenty to do at the Vineyard, where pristine beaches and relaxed, friendly living provide a great way to unwind for a long weekend or a week. But be sure to book early, as rooms on this island do go quickly.
Martha’s Vineyard has five picturesque lighthouses and miles of white, sandy beaches. The water temperature reaches about 65 degrees in mid-June, and doesn’t drop that low again until the first week in October, making for a full and delightful summer swimming season. There are nearly 20 beaches on the island, and most are open to the public.
There are two public golf courses on the island: the Farm Neck Golf Club, an 18-hole, 6,709-yard club in Oak Bluffs, and Mink Meadows Golf Club, which features 18 holes spread over 6,217 yards of rolling terrain and ocean views.
You can enter the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby, a 61-year-old contest run by the Chamber of Commerce that provides scholarships to Vineyard students. The derby runs annually from mid-September through mid-October, and features prizes for both boat and shore fishing.
The high season for Martha’s Vineyard is July and August, when most hotels require a three-night minimum and lodging rates go through the roof. Locals know that the best time for a romantic getaway on the island is in September and early October, after school starts but before the weather turns cold.
The famous Vineyard fog usually occurs after dark and burns off by 9 or 10 a.m., so if you enjoy a relaxed breakfast at your hotel, you can usually head out VFR in the summer.
Most pilots head for Martha’s Vineyard Airport (MVY), the main airport on the island, with paved runways and small airline and jet traffic. A grass field on the eastern side of the island, Katama (1B2), is a great alternative for light airplanes. Katama has three turf runways, ranging from 2,600 feet to 4,000 feet in length, and a parking area that is adjacent to the beach.
Fuel is available and there are overnight tie-downs. This airport is also within walking distance of town, while MVY requires a bus, car or bicycle to get to where the action is. Both airports have good restaurants on the field. Katama is preferred for day trips because of its proximity to sand and surf.
Car rentals in the island run $60 to $80 per day. There is an excellent bus system that picks up at MVY every 20 minutes or so and travels to all points on the island. Bus fare is about $1 per trip, or you can buy a day pass for $5 or a week pass for $15. Bicycles and mopeds, which will probably give you the most intense island experience, can also be rented in advance. Bicycles run around $20 per day, or $75 per week during peak season. By the way, the busses have bike racks on them.
The oldest town on the island, Edgartown, originally grew as a whaling port. It was almost destroyed in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, but revived again in the early 1820s. Many of the elegant buildings in Edgartown today trace their origins to that prosperous time, and today, the Edgartown historic district sports an eclectic mix of Greek Revival, Federal and Victorian structures.
Edgartown is one of the Vineyard’s best-known towns, having gained notoriety as one of the world’s great yachting centers.
The Vineyard became home to the first American deaf community in 1694, when a deaf carpenter from Cape Cod named Jonathan Lambert moved to the Vineyard with his wife, Elizabeth.
Lambert and his wife settled in West Tisbury and had seven children, two of whom were also deaf. Researchers have discovered that Lambert and several other families who arrived on the Vineyard at roughly the same time descended from an area of Kent in England that had such a high concentration of deaf people that they had developed their own sign language to help them communicate.
During the next 200 years, intermarriage among island residents produced an unusually high concentration of genetically deaf children. In the 1800s, when the incidence rate for deafness in the U.S. population was one in 5,700, the incidence of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard was one in 55, and in one area of Chilmark the ratio was as high as one in four.
Chilmark is a small, rural community of only 650 people, that is best known for the fresh seafood you can purchase in the village of Menemsha. Menemsha is also home to the Beach Plum Inn & Restaurant, an 11-room establishment overlooking the sea. The lore is that several schooners were destroyed in the harbor during a storm in 1898, and the wood that was salvaged from those ships was used to build the inn.
West Tisbury is also a rural community known locally for its writers and artists and for the agricultural fair that is held there in August.
In 1835, on the eastern side of the island near Oak Bluffs, a group of 300 Methodists set up nine tents in a semi-circle surrounding a small wooden stand made from old boards and driftwood.
They held what these days would be called a revival or spiritual meeting on the campground, and continued to return each year, forming the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Meeting Association.
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Over the years, the tents were replaced with small, boarded cottages, which were later strengthened and eventually turned into tiny Victorian cottages, many of which have stayed in families for two or three generations.
Of course, with all this history and so much to see, you might wonder what makes the Vineyard a romantic getaway. For that, you really need to go there and experience the casual elegance of the place. The friendly people, the casual, soft-spoken lifestyle. It’s a place that lends itself to rebuilding the spirit, rekindling the romance or just relaxing. 
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