Pennsylvania
After flying back to Philadelphia we picked up a rental car and drove back to New Jersey as Doug was asked to spend a week helping out on the Goethals’s bridge project. We stayed a hotel on Staten Island for the week. Fran enjoyed a day catching the free Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan where she did a great deal of just walking around in Lower Manhattan including walking the Brooklyn Bridge and back.
The temperatures are definitely much cool since we’d left the US back on Oct 12th. Glad we winterized Tigger before we left so we didn’t come back to frozen pipes.
We got back to Tigger on Nov 7th and headed inland to Lancaster County, aka Amish Country. We spent the weekend enjoying the countryside then the night at Walmart. We went a little further west to Hershey PA and enjoyed a tour and a “make your own candy bar” attraction. It was a great bit of fun.
We were going to a town called Bird in Hand back in Amish country but it was Sunday so nothing was open, not even the pretzel factory we’d hope to check out. Countryside was still quite lovely with farms, Amish homes (you can pick them out as they have no power lines or cars in the driveway) and lots of fall foliage.
Delaware/Maryland
Next we hit Delaware where we walked around Wilmington, checking out the historic sites from the 17th century onward. We walked a bit in New Castle as well which also has a great deal of history from the same era. Tonight we parked on a quiet street for the night. We moved on to Odessa, which was a pretty little town with colonial homes, then Lewes for another walk. We checked out Rehoboth Beach which is quite a commercial town with a wonderful sandy beach and boardwalk. It was so pleasant walking along the sand in the sunshine. Today it reached about 20C/70F. The night time temps drop drastically down though and we are using our furnace in the mornings to take the chill off. Brrrrr! We parked in a church parking lot tonight and it was not quite so bad next morning.
We drove inland across Delaware into Maryland stopping in Annapolis. It was Veteran’s Day/Remembrance Day (we had our poppies on!) and the US Naval Academy was very present downtown. We got there just after the services. They have a lovely downtown walk along the City Dock with a memorial to Alex Hailey and Roots as Kunta Kinte arrived as a slave here. We took a self-guided walking tour of the historic homes, some dating back to the mid 1700’s. The day started out foggy but cleared and got warm enough to take off our jackets.
Our final stop in Maryland was Fredericksburg – where there is a National Historic Site with four battlefields from the Civil War. We checked out the main one and got pretty educated on the Civil War. A lot of men died on these battlefields. The weather was perfect and the walks were quite pleasant.
