Day 25: OK, we did it. Are you happy now?

As Richard Nixon learned and John Ensign may soon learn, you are usually better off admitting to something early on rather than trying to cover it up.

Thus, I am going to admit it right up front in this post; we left Delaware again yesterday, this time to ride our bikes to New Jersey.

Having said that, I am reminded of another lesson – this one about parsing words – that I learned from Bill Clinton.

So let me clarify that, while it is technically correct to say that “we rode our bikes to New Jersey” it might be more forthcoming to say that we "rode the ferry to New Jersey." The ferry runs pretty much on the hour between Lewes and Cape May, New Jersey and the Lewes terminal is just a mile or so up the road from us.

Because the ferry landing in New Jersey is six or seven miles from the town of Cape May, it is probably more accurate to say that we rode our bikes "in New Jersey” than "to New Jersey".

Regardless, now that we have the “what” clarified many readers are probably wondering about the “why”.

The answer is very simple. Because Betsy wanted to. Since the day we arrived she has been standing on the porch watching the ferries depart for Cape May whining; “I want to go to New Jersey.”

So today we went to New Jersey and, I must admit, it was a very pleasant trip.

Cape May is similar in many respects to Lewes and Cape Henlopen; maybe a little more touristy.

There is a very nice state park nearby with a quaint little museum and an iconic lighthouse that is the symbol of Cape May and can actually be seen (if you know what you are looking for) from here in Lewes.

The park is a major spot for bird watchers and they have several miles of boardwalk trails through the marshes. We walked some of those trails and did some bird watching of our own.

As we were riding down to the park we noticed a “bird conservancy” sign and stopped, expecting some sort of aviary. It turned out to be a nice shop operated by a non-profit and they were busy preparing for the “World Series of Birding”, a 24-hour competition among three-man teams to see which team can spot the most birds in one day. Apparently winning totals in past competitions have numbered in the several hundreds.

The lady at the store described it as “full-fledged combat”.  

By the time we arrived in “downtown” Cape May it past noon but we were really hungry for a late breakfast and found the perfect spot at a beach front café with a lovely covered patio, a friendly waitress, excellent corned beef hash and a policy of serving breakfast until 1 p.m.

The weather was near-perfect, the kind where you need a jacket in the shade and a t-shirt in the sun.

From the cafe on the "promenade" along the beach we went a few blocks inland to a pedestrian mall the town has created by closing a street. It was clearly the hot spot for tourists and I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that 80 percent of them were middle-aged White women from suburban New Jersey. I'm convinced the real housewives of New Jersey hang out in Cape May.

The pedestrian mall is anchored on one end by a fabulous Catholic Church built in 1911, Our Lady Star of the Sea.

From there is was out to the park, which is technically in the town of Point Cape May (as opposed to the larger, more touristy Cape May). Point Cape May was founded as a Presbyterian Church retreat in the 1850s. Cape May began developing as a summer resort for wealthy folks in the early 1800s.

The same 1962 nor’easter that tore up much of Rehoboth Beach in 1962 also did a lot of damage in Cape May. The erosion in Point Cape May, as depicted in aerial photos in the park museum, is quite dramatic and it makes one wonder if the iconic lighthouse will survive another century.

From there it was back to ferry terminal (which entails riding on the shoulder of a fairly busy highway). They had a nice selection of draft beer at the very nice terminal building (Betsy chose Flying Fish, a New Jersey product) and we sat in the sun at a table outside and waited for the ferry to arrive from Lewes.

The crossing takes a little more than an hour and we were home and cooking supper before dark.

Day 24: The pace of life in Lewes slowly quickens

Horseshoe Crabs, the Delaware's State Marine Animal, fornicate on the beach

Not a lot to report today. Betsy worked on IABC matters while I worked at working out.

There is a subtle but noticeable change here each day as summer approaches; a few more bikes on the road, a few more cars with beach gear strapped on top, a few more bodies roasting on the beach, an uptick in the earnestness for a good time that people have when a vacation day is being used.

The eve of the summer season in Lewes is upon us.

During my bike/jog to the park I loitered for a while at Point Comfort, near the tip of Cape Henlopen, to watch the ferry leave Lewes through the breakwater the Federal government has built to help ships negotiate this raucous spot where the Atlantic and the Delaware meet.

Damn government. More wasteful, pork barrel spending I suppose. Which president started this project anyway; Clinton, Carter? Maybe one of those real big spenders, like Johnson or Roosevelt?

Nope, this Federal largess dates all the way back to the administration of the last Federalist, John Quincy Adams.

Another interesting story about another government project on the Cape. At the turn of the century (18^th to 19^th) the merchants in Philadelphia got so concerned about all the cargo and ships that were being lost in these treacherous waters that they agreed to impose a tax on all the goods unloaded at the docks in Philly to pay for a lighthouse here on the cap. It was built on what is today known as Big Dune. However, by the mid-1800s all of the trees on what had been a heavily forested cape were cut down and the beach began to erode, the sand drifted and the cape shifted and moved, growing noticeably at some points and shrinking at others. On some windy days the lightkeeper’s house was nearly covered in sand.

By 1921 the beach had eroded so much that the lighthouse toppled into the sea.

Ironically, when the Army built a concrete artillery bunker on Big Dune it helped to stabilize the sand and the dune has grown larger.

Today there are two lighthouses, unmanned of course, that sit out on the breakwaters above the cape.

I thought I might have seen an Osprey while I was out at Point Comfort, but then again maybe it was just a gull. On Osprey Cam Mrs. Osprey did stand up and move around a bit while I was there. The egg count is still two, possibly three. We will be long gone by the time they are scheduled to hatch in early June.

Still no sign of Mr. Osprey.

Day 23: Finally, New Castle & Wilmington

                                                     Betsy poses with Rocky Bluewinkle

                                                     Dave poses with William Penn

We skipped our morning exercise routine and started north (relatively) early, intent on conquering (or at least seeing some of the sites) in New Castle (Delaware’s first capital) and Wilmington (the largest city in the state).

Am I overusing (parenthetical) references?

Time (or the lack thereof) and the odd schedules at some of the sites prevented us from making any claim to total victory, but we did get a pretty good feel for these two important (and quite different) cities.

After determining that the ferry to Ft. Delaware (which is on an island in the Delaware River) did not run on weekdays until mid-June we started with a tour of George Read II’s house (this is the son of the guy who signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution). GR II built the place on waterfront in New Castle in the early 1800s in a clear attempt to become the most ostentatious person in the fledgling country his father helped create. With 22 rooms and 14,000 square feet of living area GR II could clearly declare “mission accomplished.” Apparently he was the Donald Trump of his day.

A docent from the Delaware Historical Society who appeared to be in the early stages of dementia took us on our own personal tour of the house, which has fortuitously had just four owners in two-plus centuries, including the DHS.

Read II had some financial troubles and a local guy that grew up next door and made a fortune trading with China bought the house in the 1840s. His family kept it until 1920 when it was purchased by a wealthy, childless couple that liked to party and appreciated history. The partying wife, Mrs. Philip Laird, lived in the house into the 1970s and left it to the DHS when she died. Thus, it is considerd one of the best preserved early American homes in the U.S.

Mrs. Laird and her husband also bought and restored many other buildings in New Castle and she played a significant role in preserving the historic buildings in the downtown area along the riverfront.

Today downtown New Castle may be the country’s closest and most realistic example of early 19^th Century architecture.

                                                         Close-up of New Castle's cobblestone streets.

As discussed in previous posts Delaware had a close and sometimes confusing relationship with Pennsylvania and opinions vary about precisely when (or if) it became a colony separate and apart from Pennsylvania. One thing that is not disputed is that when Penn first stepped ashore in North America it was in New Castle.

Penn soon relocated further north on the Delaware but he, Pennsylvania and particularly Philadelphia, have undeniably cast a long shadow over Delaware ever since.

Built in 1732 the New Castle Court House was the site of many important events, including the separation vote in June 1776 when, according to our excellent tour guide, the “lower three counties of the Delaware” voted not only to separate from Pennsylvania but to also declare independence from Great Britain.

                                            The (very) old New Castle Court House.

Why then, I ask him, was there all the hoopla a month later over the vote of the Delaware delegation to the Continental Congress’s declaration of independence if Delaware had already declared its independence (recall that Read voted against the declaration and Caesar Rodney had ride through the night to Philadelphia to break the tie, as detailed in a previous post)?

His answer was, essentially, that it was a “confusing time” and the exact sequence of events is uncertain.

From New Castle we drove into downtown Wilmington, which is clearly a deeply troubled city.

Downtown Wilmington reminds me of the way American cities used to look in the 1970s, basically a shell of office buildings that empty out all the White people at5 p.m., leaving a Black ghetto.

At one of our stops a few days ago I read that Wilmington may have suffered more than any other city during the race riots of the late 1960s. Apparently the National Guard troops were brought into restore order and the city was under martial law for nine months straight, making it the longest Federal occupation of a city in U.S. history.

Clearly the city leaders are trying. They have attempted to fix up the downtown streets and have built a really nice walkway along the Christiana River, but the evidence of social decay is pervasive.

One of the things that I have observed about Delaware, not just in Wilmington but throughout the state, is that there appears to be a very sharp divide between Black and White.

Roughly two-thirds of the state is White, about 22 percent are Black and Hispanics (likely undercounted) make up the rest. There does not seem to me to be much intermingling and I just get the sense that there is not much upward mobility for the Blacks.

Delaware has a very complicated racial past, being neither northern nor southern. It was a slave state but, as they take great pains to point out when discussing this topic, it had a higher proportion of free blacks than any other state. From what I can tell desegregation did not go well here and a very high percentage of schools here are private. Perhaps as much as anything, that may have reinforced what seems to me to be an unhealthy polarization of haves and have nots that is drawn along racial lines.

We went to the DHS library in downtown Wilmington in search of information about the lineage of George Read and, of course, they were closed on Wednesdays. We also did a "drive-by" of the "new" New Castle County Court House. Because of better port facilities and its location at the confluence of the Christiana and Delaware Rivers Wilmington supplanted New Castle as the county seat in the 1800s and the state capital was moved to Dover during the Revolutionary War because of (well-founded) concerns that New Castle was more prone to attack by the British.

Then we stopped by the “Old Swedes” church (an oasis of green in the middle of one of Wilmington’s roughest neighborhoods). It of course closed at 4 p.m. and we arrived at 4:05 p.m. But we did look around the outside of what is supposed to be one of the oldest active churches in the country.  

The Swedes came to the Delaware valley about the same time as the Dutch, in the 1630s, and settled in what is now Wilmington, along the Christiana River. The Dutch settled in the Lewes area. They feuded with one another for control but, as we all know, the British ultimately prevailed. Thus the evidence of the Swedes in the colonization period is rather scant. That makes the church, built in 1698, a significant artifact; especially since much of Wilmington has undergone “urban renewal” that few “artifacts” survived.

Something we have noticed is that every church that dates back to the 18^th century is surrounded by a cemetery. While it is common in Texas and the Midwest to see a cemetery adjacent to a church here in Delaware the older churches tend to sit smack in the middle of the graveyard, literally surrounded by headstones.

                                           Headstones and azaleas outside "Old Swedes" Church

By now we had had our fill of history and downtown Wilmington, so we headed off to find Frawley Stadium, home of the Wilmington Blue Rocks minor league baseball team.

It turns out that the stadium is in the heart of the small portion of Wilmington that appears to be having some success in revitalizing. There are several new restaurants and museums along the river walk the city has built along the banks of the Christina just south of downtown.

Parking at the stadium was (get this) free! So we parked, used a discount from Wawa (a popular east coast gasoline station) to buy two box seat tickets for $8 each. With an hour or so to kill we walked over to a brew pub that had a nice deck outside and we were sat there sipping fresh brews and watching the people walk/jog on the path. There were also several apparently very serious crew teams rowing up and down the river under the watchful eye of a coach who rode alongside in a boat with an outboard motor.

We had not really looked at the tickets closely and much to our shock and amazement when we walked to our seats we discovered they were on the very front row, almost directly behind home plate! Making it even more awesome, it was Michael Jackson appreciation night!!

If only Betsy had let me sign up for the moonwalk competition.

This is the view from our seats, with downtown Wilmington in the background.

I thought the Blue Rocks would be a AAA team but it turns out they are in the “upper level A” Carolina League, a farm club of the Kansas City Royals. The opponent was the Salem (Va.) Red Sox. It was a very enjoyable, crisply-played game, with the Rocks prevailing 3-2.

Built in the early 90s Frawley is a very nice stadium, similar to Wolff Stadium in SA but with more a little more character…including the buzz of traffic on nearby I-95.

Thanks to our great seats we were able to get some good mascot shots.

Supposedly the Blue Rocks have three mascots; Rocky Bluewinkle, a blue moose; Mr. Celery, a stalk of celery that comes out to "CEL"-a-brate when Wilmington scores a run, and; Rubble, a giant blue rock.

We saw quite a bit of Rocky Bluewinkle, who very graciously took some time out for the photo with Betsy that you saw at the top of this post.

However, Mr. Celery appeared on the field only fleetingly and there was no sign whatsoever of Rubble. At one point I wondered aloud why Mr. Celery did not stay out on the field longer and Betsy promptly quipped; "He can't stay out long, he's perishable."

I was however able to get a candid shot of Mr. Celery in the runway under the bleachers and, as you can probably tell by the expression on his face, must have caught him at an awkward moment.

It was nearly 11 p.m. by the time we got home, making this our longest day since the drive to Knoxville.

Day 22: The new normal

We needed some R&R after yesterday’s exhausting trip to northern Delaware and points slightly beyond.

So we settled in for what has become something of a routine on the days we are here “at home” on the cape. In the morning I go to the park and Betsy goes to town. In the afternoon we ride our bikes to Rehoboth to pick up fresh beer and fish. Then we ride back, watch the sunset from the porch and drink the beer and eat the fish (and the asparagus, sweet potatoes, etc.). There was a special treat today because the King’s Speech had arrived in the mail, so we spent the post-sunset hours watching the movie.

There is photo documentation of our day below. 

One thing we did do today that was a little different from the routine was to explore the southern portion of Cape Henlopen State Park, which is accessible only from Rehoboth in the spring and summer because it is a nesting ground for birds.

We were able to ride out to a viewing platform at Gordon's Pond, which is a salt marsh catchment area just west of the shoreline that is a major stopping off place for birds migrating along the east coast.

We also walked along the beach a bit where the waves seem to be a bit bigger than they are in the northern section of the park.

 

Recall that the park used to be an Army lookout post for enemy ships. There are about a dozen of these lookout towers in the park and these two are the southern-most of them.

Betsy is a speck in the distance on this section of the bike trail between Lewes and Rehoboth.

Gordon's Pond.

Day 21: Northern Delaware & brief forays over the border

We purposely left Delaware (again) today, to look at something in another state.

A very alert blog reader e-mailed me recently about the trip to the Mets game, asking if this meant that we had abandoned our initial plan to “really get to know Delaware.”  The alert reader correctly pointed out that, in my initial post, I said we would leave Delaware only for two Tex-related trips to Annapolis.

That is true. Although we had the idea of making a day trip to Citi Field long before we left home I failed to mention it in the initial post.

However a third trip to Annapolis (for the play) was not originally planned and neither was yesterday’s dash across the border to the Andrew Wyeth Gallery in the Brandywine River Museum in Chads Ford, Pennsylvania.

Like us readers are simply going to have to accept that these forays are merely serendipitous slips from, rather than outright abandonment of, our unwavering commitment to really get to know the great state of Delaware.

Because the trip to Wilmington takes nearly two hours we hopped in the car (after the morning bike/jog to/in the park) and I started driving while Betsy began sifting through the mounds of information we have collected about things to see and do.

The Wyeth gallery in Chads Ford is something that has repeatedly come up in conversations,when we ask Delawarians what they recommend that we see and do during our stay here. When Betsy discovered that Andrew’s granddaughter Victoria would be leading a tour of the gallery our decision was made.

Victoria Wyeth was a hoot, the gallery was fantastic and the scenery was fabulous. It was a great decision.

Victoria is “Andy’s” only grandchild and she gave the impression of having known him quite well, sprinkling her talk with personal stories and recollections. She seemed mildly annoyed when I ask about her grandfather’s relationship with Helga and she stuck to her stance that Helga was simply a model that her grandfather liked to paint because he found her “interesting.” Even though my question was open ended;“what was the nature of their relationship?”; she chose to answer with her own much more specific question; “would you ask your grandparents about their sexual relationships?”

If I knew that my grandfather had hundreds of paintings of the same woman, often nude and spanning decades; yes, I might have inquired about the “nature” of their relationship.

Interestingly, Victoria Wyeth made a glancing reference during her talk that seemed to suggest that she herself had been a nude model for her some of her grandfather’s paintings; painting she apparently keeps out of public view in her own personal collection.

There were about 50 Andrew Wyeth paintings on display in the gallery.

The northern Delaware terrain near the Pennsylvania border is very different from the rest of the state; very hilly and heavily treed, with narrow, twisting roads.

It was beautiful sunny day and the drive was a treat itself.

We took an impossibly narrow, curvy road to look at a covered bridge. What’s interesting about this bridge is not that it dates from the 1850s and had been preserved with substantial effort, but that it was destroyed by a flood in 2008 and a new covered bridge was built to replace it. Thus, we may very well have driven across the newest covered bridge in the world.

We got to the Hagley Museum and Library on the outskirts of Wilmington too late to tour the du Pont mansion (one of several in Delaware) but we did have time to go through the museum and get a better handle on Delaware’s most influential and important family and corporate entity.

The du Pont family patriarch was a confidant of Louis XIV and, in 1799, in what can only be described as a “heady” move, he loaded up the family and moved from France to New Jersey with a bunch of borrowed money, looking for something to invest in.

One of his sons hit on the idea of manufacturing gunpowder, which was in short supply and of inferior quality in the fledgling USA. The du Ponts searched about for the perfect spot to set up a “black powder” manufacturing plant and found it along the Brandywine River in northern Delaware.

For the next century a succession of du Ponts plowed the profits from gunpowder and dynamite sales back into the manufacturing operation. By the time World War I rolled around the company was uniquely (many would say monopolistically) positioned to reap “explosive” profits from the business.

Trustbusters cried foul and that generation of du Ponts saw the handwriting on the wall and sought to diversify. They did so by aggressively plowing profits into chemical research and development that resulted in hundreds of new inventions (like Teflon, Nylon and Tivec, the ubiquitous construction material the construction workers have draped all over the outside of our condo) that America consumers soon couldn’t live without. In fact, as the photo below documents, Betsy took some time out of her busy day to invent a few things herself in one of the Du Pont labs.

To put it mildly the du Ponts have had an outsized influence on Delaware, including some governors and a congressman.  I saw one report indicating their funding for segregated schools for Blacks shamed the legislature into increasing funding for White schools. The company continues to be among the largest employers in the state and there is still a family member on the board of directors.

From the spectacular Brandywine River valley we drove east through suburban Wilmington to “the Wedge”. Alert readers may recall the discussion in an earlier post about the wedge, which was a sort of no-man’s land where Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania meet at the point where Mason and Dixon’s straight survey lines intersect with the half circle that King Charles II drew with compass pointed on the old courthouse in New Castle to settle the dispute between the Penns and the Calverts. The final boundary was not determined until an Act of Congress settled the matter in 1921.

Supposedly there is a tri-state marker and we wanted to see it but had to settle for driving back and forth over the state lines of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Delaware in a vain search.

We stopped at a brewpub near the U of D campus in Newark for a snack and drove home.

Day 20: Another bike ride across Delaware

                                            This is our kind of retirement home.

Dr. Harry Hughes, the minister here at one of the oldest Presbyterian churches in the United States, got our day started with the disturbing message that there is more to life than checking accomplishments off of so-called bucket lists. I think he may have said something or other about grass withering and flowers fading but the Lord’s word endures forever; or words to that effect.

We quickly pushed those thoughts aside and drove to the northern part of the state where Betsy checked another item off of her bucket list by riding her bike across Delaware in 50 minutes. I’m not kidding! It took her 50 minutes and 50 seconds to cover the roughly 11.7 miles from the Maryland border to Delaware City on the Delaware River. She averaged 13.9 mph, reached a maximum speed of 22.6 mph and had a total ascent of 165 feet and descent of 241 feet (stats provided via Betsy’s i-phone).

We celebrated checking another accomplishment off the list with an early crab cake supper washed down with some fresh Delaware beer while sitting on the deck of the indelicately-named Crabby Dick’s restaurant, which offers a beautiful view of the Delaware River (and New Jersey).

Topping off a perfect Mother’s Day; Tex called!

In addition to Mother’s Day it was also Betsy’s grandfather’s birthday and she tried to suggest that her (very) carefully plotted route across the narrowest part of the state was somehow evidence of her ancestral “German ingenuity.”

Of course, I thought to myself; “aren’t Germans supposed to be known for their work ethic?” But, after all, it was Mother’s Day; so I let her bask in the genetic glow. After all, we were just a few miles down the road/river from George Read’s house.

Betsy’s ride through the Wilmington suburbs was quite different than my earlier bike ride across a much more rural (and wider) part of the state. Some of the roads on her route (including a portion of U.S. Highway 40) were quite busy even on a Sunday afternoon. While I had to endure passing by a chicken processing plant, Betsy’s ride featured a petroleum refinery.

Welcome to Delaware.

I do commend the state of Delaware for its evident commitment to bicycling. DelDOT has produced some awesome bicycle maps for each county that show which roads have bike lanes and/or paved shoulders and it makes it very easy to plot point to point routes.

Also there is ample evidence that there is a state-wide effort to grow the network and improve bicycle facilities by requiring developers to add lane width and to stripe bike lanes as part of the land development process.

It was a picture-perfect day with lots of sun, light winds and highs in the low 70s.

                                           Betsy prepares to take off at the Maryland state line.

                                           A more scenic finish on the Delaware River.

                                                         Betsy checks her stats.

                                           Sunset from the porch.