Historical Philadelphia and Winterthur, Delaware

For a little less than a week we stayed in West Chester, PA at a very nice KOA. While in the area we visited Longwood Gardens (see previous two posts), downtown Philadelphia, and the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in nearby Delaware.

The area, called the Brandywine Valley is known for its historical richness, and this was evident on every back road.  Small, two story stone homes (some of them plastered and painted white) accompanied at times by huge stone barns are nestled in valleys, along the rivers, in little towns and on the rolling hills. I wanted to take many pictures, but there were rarely any shoulders on the roads to pull off safely, and all the locals are going about their 21st century business at breakneck speeds.  This is, after all, a commuter suburb of Philadelphia and Wilmington, DE.

I was able to take pictures of one home that is typical of the area - the John Chad house, after whom the town of Chadds Ford was named. John Chad had a ferry that crossed the Brandywine.

 The stone is called blue stone according to the information on site, even though it is all different colors.

This barn was on a side road where I could safely pull off for a second. It was a real beauty. Notice the slits in the stone walls for ventilation.

We also spent a day in Philadelphia to basically see Independence Square. Parking was a hassle, as was finding our way around. We bought our tickets for the tour, had an uninspiring lunch somewhere and wandered around a bit.

I did like this view of a side street in the historic district.

Here's a view of Independence Hall.  We aren't wild about cities, so we were in an out pretty quickly. I'm sure we missed a lot of things that others would find interesting. Sorry Philadelphia.

In contrast, our visit to Winterthur was relaxed and inspiring. It was quieter than Longwood - fewer visitors, but the same kind of quality experience in every way. At the Visitors Center you get a tram that takes you on a long ride through the extensive arboretum and woodland gardens, then deposits you at the house/museum (below).  The house, once the residence of Henry Francis duPont and now a museum, is nine stories on the side you can see here, and four stories on the back. It is built into a hillside and surrounded by trees. Very low profile except for this view. Not particularly inspiring on the outside.

Henry duPont was a collector of antique American furniture, tools, and housewares of various sorts, and his home was completely furnished with them.  Each room of the house had a different style of furnishings. Below are a set of Paul Revere silver tankards in a room furnished in the same period as the tankards. 

Guests are led through the house in groups of ten, by a very informative guide.  Unlike similar places , guests are free to take pictures. I noticed that items (like silverware) that were sitting out on the furniture were strung with clear filament like fishing line - so fine you could barely see it. I suppose it was all hooked in to some kind of alarm system. There were times when the guide was way ahead of us, and it would be pretty easy for someone to pocket some silverware, so the security system must be effective.

This colonial era room was one of our favorites. 

This room had hand painted Chinese wallpaper from the 18th century.

An adjacent building is a more typical museum with other collections of American material culture including tools and primitive arts. 

This grand staircase is in the museum section.  Looks just like an eye from this angle, doesn't it?

Outside there are lovely gardens to wander through, but very low key compared to Longwood.  There was also an interesting gift shop and a excellent small cafe.  

Oh, I almost forgot the Campbell's soup tureen collection. We found it odd.  

Next stop, Fallingwater!

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.