Our Last Day on Cape May and a Long Journey Through a Short State

We finished our stay on Cape May with a final tour around to places we hadn't seen yet. This included the beaches down the west side of the Cape, on the shores of Delaware Bay. Our first stop was Reeds Beach. 

Second stop was Norbury Landing, where the tide was way out, 

exposing lots of horseshoe crabs, tiny snails and acres of mud. Very sticky walking.

The fall wild flowers all around Cape May have been beautiful this week, even right on the beach. 

Lots of golden rod, sunflowers and asters.

Proceeding south along the shore we ended up at the Cape May-Lewes Ferry Terminal where we got an anticipatory look at the layout for our ferry ride with the RV tomorrow.  The ferry terminal is easy to get to, and there's plenty of space in the approach (unlike some ferry landing squeezes we had in the Pacific NW).

There is a big dredging project going on right at the mouth of the Cape May Canal. This little boat was doing something with that project, but the crew on board was doing something else entirely that looked like more fun than working.

We finished our drive back on the east shore with dinner at Fred's Tavern in Stone Harbor. To get home we took the series of causeway bridges over Nummy Island and the various bays and salt marshes. 

I think this fisherman was going for crabs. He wasn't having a lot of luck while I was there, so I couldn't say for sure what he was catching.

Just at sunset, from the top of the last and largest bridge we spotted a cluster of rickety little houses along the water and headed off through the salt marshes to find them. All the homes in the tiny community of Grassy Sound Boardwalk are built right on the salt marsh or over the water, and the only access to them is over the boardwalks, thus the name. 

Some of the houses look like they have had some beatings in recent storms, 

or are just wearing with time, but they all had a lot of personality.

The northern end of the boardwalk looks like a party place, but I didn't see a single soul while I explored around.  Just a couple of feral cats. 

So ended our visit to Cape May, except for our drive to the ferry the following morning. We thought we had plenty of time to get there, but ran into an incident of some sort on the Garden State Parkway and made some decisions to avoid the back up that didn't help our time either. But we made it to the ferry with literally about two minutes to spare. Lucky us. They put us right on with no wait. You can see the DRV tucked in (with just a few inches clearance overhead) near the middle and Ms. Subaru on the right.

It was a perfect day for a boat ride - clear and calm. The ferry takes about 1 1/2 hours, and runs from the southern tip of Cape May to the southern tip of Delaware, across the mouth of the Delaware River. 

Southern Delaware seems to be a lot of flat farm country.  Corn and soybeans, like Iowa. We drove north along the entire length of the state. Here we are on Route 1, crossing the Chesapeake-Delaware Canal on the new bridge. 

After skirting around Wilmington pretty painlessly, we arrived in Pennsylvania at the West Chester KOA on the banks of the Brandywine Creek, in the midst of the historic and scenic Brandywine Valley. 

Despite being pretty beat from a longer than usual travel day, 

 I couldn't turn in without walking down to the Brandywine. 

It's one of the prettiest settings for a campground that I've seen. It's on wooded rolling hills that lead down to the river.  The sun was just setting as I headed home for bed.

Tomorrow, we'll begin exploring the area with a visit to Longwood Gardens.