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PROVINCETOWN GUIDE
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| DIRECTORY |
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Provincetown :: Monday, September 6th 2010
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Art's Dune Tours has been around since 1946. |
Touring the Dunes
History and Beauty with Art's Dune Tours
July 11th, 2010
It’s hard to spend time in the Province Lands dunes without losing your sense of time. Something about all that sand rolling into the distance and the echo of the Atlantic’s nearby throbbing just makes the mind lose its temporal bearings. It just seems so forever.
| Art’s Dune Tours offers 1-hour tours in the summer season from morning to sunset. |
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But, of course, the dunes were not always there. It took thousands of years of Atlantic winds and currents to erode them into their current form. And they’re never done changing.
Visit them one day and go back the next, and you’ll have two different experiences, which perhaps explains the constancy of Art’s Dune Tours, a company that has been leading visitors on dune explorations for the last 60 plus years.
|  Art Costa - a ''King of the Dunes.'' |
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Opened by Art Costa, a raconteur armed with dune lore, the company began leading tours in 1946. While there have been a few changes since then, such as replacing the 1936 Ford Woody that was originally used for tours with a fleet of Suburbans, the company is still owned and operated by the same family today.
And every summer it continues to carry visitors through the ever-shifting parabolic curves of the Province Lands.
It’s a mesmerizing experience. Sloping sands undulate into the sun-struck distance. Eastern spadefoot toads, plovers and other rare creatures can sometimes by spyed, along with the occasional right whale breaching in the distant ocean’s swell. And bright green grasses edge the contours of the whole environment, seeming to clinging miraculously as single shoots in the soft sands.
Besides the beauty, the tours also include a narrated history of the dune’s doings and dwellings, which lend themselves to anecdote, as many artists and characters have lived for a time in the dunes. The more famous include Eugene O’Neill, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, e.e. cummings, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning. Some of the shacks they occupied were built in the 1800s to shelter members of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, and they are still used by artists today.
Art’s Dune Tours offers 1-hour tours in the summer season from morning to sunset. All tours depart from 4 Standish Street. For more information about Art’s Dune Tours, visit www.artsdunetours.com or call 508.487.1950.
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