Legendary Drives: Historic Old King's Highway in Cape Cod

Route 6 runs from coast to coast, from Long Beach, California, to Provincetown, Massachusetts. The stretch that extends along the spine of Cape Cod is a road, obviously. It is also a time machine.

On Route 6, I could be five years old, in the backward-facing backseat of my parents’ green station wagon, keeping a lookout for the Wellfleet Drive-In’s marquee so I know what movies are playing.

I could be 12, lying on a pile of suitcases in the back seat of the maroon-and-white Chevy Suburban, heading for the ocean beaches where, if you get a permit, you’re allowed to steer your four-wheel-drive-equipped vehicle right onto the sand. My dad used to pull the car’s bench out of the car, set it up on the sand and read the year’s accumulated back issues of The New Yorker, and I’d read alongside him, just to show that I could.

I could be 33, behind the wheel, with my newborn daughter in the car seat that my mom’s new girlfriend is using as an armrest while she knits. I’ll take the Eastham exit to drop her and mom off. (They’ll run up the driveway, giggling, and I will marvel that love is love, and that new love is new love.)

And I could be 54, driving my girls back to Philadelphia, and the train station, for college.

I grew up in Connecticut, spending a part of almost every summer on the Outer Cape. I know the road by heart: the secret passage that my mom called the Bat Chute, just past a liquor store in Truro that connected to Depot Road. I know how to wait for a just-large-enough gap in traffic to turn left out of the Audubon Camp in Wellfleet, which my daughters both attended for years.

Best chocolate: the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, just off the rotary in Orleans. Best oysters: Victor’s, at happy hour, all the way at the end of the earth, just before Route 6 curves around the outer edge of the Cape. Best doughnuts I know: the Hole in One, either right on Route Six in Eastham, or a mile from the rotary in Orleans.

Route Six has always had a touch of magic, bringing me to my favorite places, connecting me to my past, soothing cranky babies after a day at the beach. “Look for the signs! Count the sixes,” my mom would say to my daughter, Lucy, when she was fussy, and, from her carseat, we’d hear Lucy’s tiny, piping, voice saying, “Number six...number six...number six.”