Cape Cod Bed and Breakfast - Brewster By The Sea Inn & Spa

Want a taste of French cafe life while on the Cape? Last night we had the distinct pleasure of dining at the Pain D'Avignon cafe in Hyannis. They had invited us to be their guests to experience the new dinner menu knowing that we have an upscale and romantic cape cod bed and breakfast.

We recommend dining to our rather discriminating guests all the time, assuring our big city guests from Boston, Providence, and New York that they will likely not be disappointed in their dining experiences here on the cape. For six years we have dined around the Cape, as well as collecting daily reports from our guests, so that our recommended restaurant list we send people prior to their stay is exciting. We love to try new restaurants for not only our personal enjoyment but also to be well educated when our guests ask us where to dine.

The cafe is actually an addition off of the main bakery on a commercial side street in Hyannis very near to the rotary and airport. The drive up appeal is no indication of what you will find inside since the bakery is located in a very busy and commercial section of the city. Once inside the experience takes on a whole new meaning. The decor is very french, simple yet elegant and live, very jazzy, music completed the atmosphere.

They make 9,000 to 13,000 pounds of bread a week as a commercial bakery using the finest ingredients to be found in the US. They gave us a complete tour of the facility and we found it to be fascinating and exciting. They are one of the largest individual employers on the Cape and their products are found in the finest resorts, restaurants, and hotels on and off the Cape.

Our highest regards to Pain D'Avignon for a job and business well done. Highly recommended.

We are continually updating our inn and changing our amenities to keep things fresh for our new and repeat guests. We also have committed to a "green" environmental focus when making these changes. We recycle when possible and are very proud of our compost palace which is used daily. My husband Byron has become quite the photographer, and we both marveled at this picture which shows the left over fruit cutting that were going out to the compost after one of our daily breakfasts.

We actually have expanded our Cape Cod Bed and Breakfast compost palace to include three different bins made up of cement blocks. The first one is our active pile where we add daily vegetable and plant clippings. When I am working in the the vegetable and perennial gardens I always have two buckets- one for weeds which I throw away and the other for deadheading, which is the dead flowers and plants that I add to our compost. The second bin is covered with plastic and is allowed to age for one year. That will be next year's fertilizer for the gardens. The third bin is our treasure. That is compost from two years ago. It becomes a dark brown color and you almost can feel the richness as you run the soil through your fingertips. I have grown to appreciate how special this compost is because I have seen the difference between plants and vegetables that have had or not had the compost added to the soil. We also like to add cow manure to the compost and gardens along with peat moss as needed to break up the soil.

This year's gardening has been a challenge due to all the rain. We have been enjoying plenty of lettuce, parsley, chives, nasturtiums, peas and recently some zucchini and squash. The recent sunshine has everything growing fast, and we anxiously await when we can have our first tomatoes for our summer BLT's.

My favorite time of the day is when I go out to the vegetable garden early in the morning to collect all of the herbs and garnish that I need for our daily breakfasts. Our guests are all sleeping, the air is so morning fresh, the birds are happily chatting with the world and for just that moments everything seems to stop in time . Our dog Harrison loves to follow and we usually have a quick game of chase before I head in to put the finishing touches on our breakfasts.

Like videos? Here is a Cape Cod Times Video for composting

Mention Cape Cod and many different images come to mind....sunbathing, whale watching, fishing, kayaking, fresh seafood, history, art galleries, etc. All of these combine to form the unique ambiance and unpretentious charm that attracts so many people to Cape Cod, but, the most prominent Cape Cod image is our beaches.. We took a day off to buy our season pass to the national seashore and to spend a full day at the beach. This picture is Race Point beach in Provincetown.

We have lived in Brewster for almost six years now and are continually amazed and in awe of how unique and different each beach, both bay and ocean sides, is on the Cape. Thankfully the national seashore was established in 1961 to help protect many of the beautiful beaches on the Atlantic side. The National Seashore contains 44,000 acres along a 40 mile section of the coastline between Chatham and Provincetown.

The Cape is actually a glacial deposit that is continually undergoing changes as winds and water move sand along the shorelines, tearing away one place and building another. Art's Dune Tours in Provincetown is a must do if your Cape Cod vacation is 4 or more days. You can get a good sense of how quickly things are changing by looking at the diminishing beach at the Marconi Station Site in Wellfleet, where the peninsula is only a mile wide. Much of the high cliffs has eroded since Guglielmo Marconi first built his towers there in 1901. Changing too, though not so perceptibly is the Cape Cod Bay shoreline. Great Island in Wellfleet, where whalers used to congregate, can be explored via trails and one can walk out to the tip during low tide.It's hard to believe that houses use to exist many years ago on that thin peninsula.

So, the big question that we love to ask our guests is what is your favorite beach? We have many favorites! We love our Brewster flats which is just a short walk from our inn. Paine's Creek is a photographer's haven at sunset when the last rays of the day cascade beautiful colors over the bay. We also enjoy Nauset Beach and have marveled at the dedicated surfers that continue their sport in the colder months. We love Marconi for the beautiful waves and love to collect stones on Coast Guard beach. We recently enjoyed a tour in Provincetown with Art's Dunes Tour. What a hoot.....we were fortunate to have the owner Robert Costa as our tour guide who added much history about the dune shacks and marveled at the natural beauty of the dunes.

During our last trip to visit Race Point Beach we picked up a newspaper outlining all of the summer activities coordinated by the National Seashore.The list was impressive and has different activities to appeal to all age groups.One can learn about snorkeling, tour the three sister lighthouses,learn about the history, take a guided walk on Nauset Marsh or join in on a campfire. Check out the FRIENDS of the Cape Cod National Seashore to see how dedicated Cape codders, even us washashores are, to the majesty of our national treasure. A challenge to each and all: just try to find the definition to washashore. We were assured when we first arrived that one would be a washashore unless you and your relatives had lived here for 6 generations.