We left Yardley on November 2, heading south.  We took I95 through Philadelphia and into Delaware with Dover as our first stop.  Since we both grew up within an hour of Philly we didn’t feel compelled to navigate the city streets with the camper to see historical sites we’ve already seen, so we stuck to the highway with the exception of a minor detour near the airport to avoid a toll we couldn’t pay.  Even with the highway driving, and with exceptionally nice  non-freeway roads in Delaware, it still took us almost four hours to reach Dover, which, since we hadn’t left Yardley until noon, put us there near the end of the day.

We found free parking on the street about four blocks from the Capitol.  The city immediately around the Capitol is tree lined streets, mostly cobblestones, with lots of pretty brick buildings.  However, within a few blocks we found residential neighborhoods with older houses that weren’t scrupulously maintained, and with lots of people just hanging out on the street.  We were immediately approached and asked for money which didn’t make us feel so great about leaving the camper, but we risked a quick walk to see the Capitol complex, and everything was fine.  This is where Tom stopped and went into the EZPass office, which I mentioned a few posts ago, and that stop took more time than seeing the Capitol.  We made it back to the car only to be approached by two more guys hanging out on the street.  One of them decided to tease Princha with a turkey sandwich, which resulted in her channeling her inner Rottweiler when she didn’t get a bite.  That ended that encounter, and we got back in the truck to find a place to park for the night. 

Our next stop was Assateague Island National Seashore, which was about a two hours’ drive.  We didn’t want to do that at night, so we found a nearby Lowe’s and got permission to park for the night.  We left fairly early the next morning and took the excellent Delaware roads to Assateague. Our first order of business was to see if they had room in the National Park campground; they didn’t, so we spent a little time booking a night at a fairly close state park campground before touring the park.  

I’ve wanted to see Assateague since I was a little girl and read Misty of Chincoteague, which was required reading for every horse-crazy girl.  We had been warned that the horses sometimes didn’t make an appearance, but we found plenty of them.  We tried walking on the beach, but the horses weren’t there and it wasn’t much fun slogging through the sand with the dogs, so we ended up walking the bike path to the end of the “developed” part of the park, which took us through some scrub brush where we saw not only horses, but also both types of deer which inhabit the park.   

We left Assateague and headed for Trap Pond State Park, where we had made a reservation for the night.  The campground was a little crowded, but it’s situated in a pine forest near a small lake (or large pond, whichever way you want to look at it) and it was very nice.  If we had known how much there was to do there we might have stayed for a couple of nights, but even at the end of the season it was busy with the beautiful fall weather, so we contented ourselves with a five-mile loop walk around the lake in the morning before heading for Maryland.

From Trap Pond State Park, we went to the Harriet Tubman National Historical Museum.  This was interesting to us on two counts.  First, Harriet Tubman is a well known historical figure in Upstate New York where we used to live, both because of her work with the Underground Railroad, and because of her work with the Women’s Suffrage Movement.  In my view, she’s somewhat overshadowed by Frederick Douglass with her involvement in the Underground Railroad as it is presented in NY, and is quite possibly better well known for her work with the Women’s Movement.  In Maryland, at this museum, it’s all about the Underground Railroad, with very good reason, because what she managed to do is overwhelmingly impressive.  The second thing we found interesting is that the museum isn’t the building on the site, which has a very interesting and impressive display, but it is a collection of sites and buildings around the area where Harriet Tubman had connections in her life and her work.  We were disappointed, because if we had known what the “museum” really was, we would have set aside the whole day to drive around and take the full tour.  As it was, we spent a couple of hours at the central museum building, and then headed for our Harvest Hosts overnight with plans to visit Annapolis and Washington, DC the next day.

We’ve tried to hit the capitals either late in the afternoon after work hours, or on weekends.  We kept to this plan with Annapolis and DC, with a Sunday visit.  Annapolis was less than an hour from Triple Creek Winery, which was our Harvest Hosts overnight, but we then spent another half hour trying to find a place to park because the entire area around the Capitol is under construction. Tom finally found a 2-hour place near a small memorial park, and we docked and walked the few blocks to the Capitol.  Unfortunately, the construction around the Capitol extended to the Capitol itself, and it’s normally impressive dome was shrouded in tarps.  We were impressed with the number of people out walking around the streets on a wet and chilly Sunday morning, and a number of them stopped to talk to us, and we are taking their word that the building and the dome are normally quite beautiful.

From Annapolis, we drove straight to Washington, DC.  It was a quick and straight shot into DC, but getting to the actual Capitol building was a challenge.    While we were still in Annapolis, it took us a bit of time to manipulate the TomTom Trucker navigator to get us into DC on a road where we could fit.  We ended up routing ourselves to The Mall, which worked, but it was definitely one of our tenser drives as we had to pay very close attention to stay on streets and highways where we were legal - and where we wouldn’t end up stuck in a bad situation.  We finally made it onto the streets around The Mall, but our Sunday plan backfired since we didn’t realize that because parking is free on Sundays in the city, all the locals drive in to walk The Mall and see the sights.  We ended up doing a few circuits of The Mall, and then following a security guard’s directions to get as close to the Capitol building as possible to snap a few photos, before resetting the TomTom to allow us to escape the metropolis.  Even with the slow going and two capitals behind us, we made it to our friend Sarah’s house in Warrenton, VA, in time for a Caesar salad lunch and a very enjoyable afternoon and evening before heading for Shenandoah National Park the next day.

​We left Doylestown headed for my cousin’s house in Mt. Arlington, NJ.  Lorraine had visited us in Belize about 12 years ago with her sister Doreen and their dad, my Uncle Don.  We’ve talked occasionally since then, but haven’t seen each other, and since Uncle Don passed about a year ago, we really wanted to see her since we missed getting to visit Uncle Don on this trip.  Plus, we had to deliver a prayer candle for Uncle Don to Lorraine from Maria, so we had an excuse even though no excuse was needed.  Lorraine and Larry live in north Jersey, just off I-80.  With family in trucking and construction forever, they knew that we might have some issues with the GPS directions, so Larry met us and guided us to their house on a camper friendly route.  We had a wonderful visit, reminiscing about Uncle Don, who helped the Phillies win one of their World Series games with his prayer candle burning in front of the television.  The blessing didn’t hold for the World Series win, but we could all hear Uncle Don saying that he didn’t expect anything else from the Phils.  We also had a bonus on this stop, because halfway through dinner Lorraine realized that I didn’t know that our other cousin Mary Ellen lived just around the corner.  It was too late to get together, but we had a nice chat on the phone, and her husband Karl stopped by for a quick visit in the morning before we left.  Larry took us on a walk around the neighborhood with their dogs Cenzo and Katie, and in the morning we left for central Jersey, well stocked with Larry’s delicious care package of leftover roast beef and gravy, as well as real Italian meatballs and spaghetti sauce, which kept us fed for the next couple of days.

​We had a pleasant enough drive south, for the most part avoiding the crazy traffic on I80 and I287 which had made the trip north a little tense.  We took 206 down to where we basically knew where we were again, and took a drive past Pennington on Rt. 31 before stopping at the NJ Washington Crossing State Park for a hike.  The trails in the park haven’t really changed since we were kids, which was refreshing, and we took a small detour from the riverside park to walk into Titusville and see the school where I went from kindergarten through sixth grade.  What used to be a kickball field is now the teachers’ parking lot, but other than that the school looks the same.

​We left the park and drove into Trenton to check off the New Jersey Capitol building.  The Capitol is just down the street from the New Jersey State Museum and Planetarium, where we were both regular visitors as kids between family visits for me, Boy Scout visits for Tom, and school visits for both of us.  Despite regularly being in the neighborhood as kids, neither of us could remember what the Capitol was like, so we treated it like every other Capitol we’ve visited.  Unfortunately, the building itself as well as lots of the area around it are under construction, so we couldn’t see much and couldn’t get very good photographs.  With all the construction it was difficult to even walk around it, so we spent less than an hour there before heading for friends Carol and Karen in Yardley…after blowing through another EZPass toll on the Scudders Falls Bridge.

​Carol and Karen have lived in Yardley for 38 years, so when our camper appeared on their street their neighbors immediately appeared to see what it was.  We parked right in front of the house, and then chatted with their neighbors and friends, meeting the neighborhood dogs and letting our dogs get met, as well as giving a few camper tours.  We enjoyed the convenience of being able to walk into town for dinner at the Vault brewery, where we enjoyed delicious beer as well as wood oven pizza.  After dinner we did a brief towpath stroll to see Pumpkin Row, where about a half mile of lit Jack-O-Lanterns lined the towpath.  We returned home to watch the Phillies lose, and then spent a quiet night in the camper in the neighborhood.  In the morning we went with Karen and took the dogs for a walk on the towpath where we saw all of the pumpkins, as well as the underside of the new Scudders Falls Bridge which we’d illegally crossed the previous afternoon.  We were interested to see that one of the features of the new bridge is a pedestrian crossing, so people and bicycles can now cross into Trenton, and ambitious bicyclists can now do a towpath loop on both the New Jersey and Pennsylvania sides of the Delaware River using that bridge.  Tom prides himself on crossing that bridge illegally on his bicycle on Christmas morning when he was a kid, so while this might seem like an unimportant detail to some, we found it significant.  After our walk, we cleaned up, packed up, and headed for Delaware with two more capitals, a National Seashore, and Washington, DC in sight.

We didn’t leave the Prattsburgh area until mid afternoon, so we only made it as far as Lewisburg.  We stopped for a nice hike in a small park right off of Rt. 15 just north of Lewisburg, and then found a rather quiet Walmart where we spent a peaceful night.  In the morning, Tom called around and found an oil change place with a bay to fit us in Harrisburg, just a few miles from the Capitol.  We stopped there, and barely fit in the bay.  It was so tight that they ended up backing the truck out rather than risking the other door of the drive through.  The highlight of the stop for me was that I spotted and killed my first lantern fly, which I was happy to do after seeing all the billboards and posters about them as we drove through the Northeast. ​

​We then headed into Harrisburg to check another capitol building off our list.  The Harrisburg Capitol building is very big and very imposing, and it’s actually a little difficult to decide which side is the front.  We still can’t decide if it’s the side facing the park like area, or the side facing the river with pink fountain in front, which was pink in honor of breast cancer month.  The area around the Capitol is very old Pennsylvania, with lots of brick townhouses on cobblestone streets. We parked five or six blocks from the Capitol building, and even that far away the neighborhood was very nice.  The best part about Harrisburg was that the city has a wonderful river walk with one path running along the river at the edge of the city, and another path below it built up right at the edge of the river.  Harrisburg might not be in our top 3 list of capitols, but it was definitely on the “nicer” side of the list.

We finished walking around the city in the late afternoon and started looking for a place to stay.  We had originally planned to go to a Harvest Hosts brewery near Gettysburg, but they were full.  We looked at a couple of Walmarts and a Cabela’s, but found that none of those places around the city allow overnight parking.  So, we headed for Gifford Pinchot State Park, which turned out to be beautiful from what we could see when we arrived shortly before dark.  In the morning, we took the dogs for a quick walk just to see the park before heading for Gettysburg National Military Park.​

Gettysburg was very interesting, and we did a lot of walking.  Both of us had visited the park as kids, but neither of us really remembered it.  I remembered walking on trails, and Tom remembered hiking with the Boy Scouts, but the significance of the park and how it’s organized must have been beyond us as kids.  The park has a central visitors’ center, but it is really a gigantic history museum which is laid out as a walking or driving tour which takes visitors through the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg.  We have the dogs with us and we love to walk, plus driving and parking the camper is cumbersome at best and sometimes impossible, so we followed the park map for walking and explored the site.  We weren’t able to see everything in one day of hiking around, but the entire park is filled with monuments to all the regiments who fought in the battle, with interpretive signs explaining the significance of each location.  Besides the monuments, the park has been left mostly as the farmland it was when the Battle of Gettysburg took place, so it’s easy to use your imagination to envision all the troops clashing at the different locations around the town.  Our plan for the next day was to visit The Valley Forge National Military Park, so we found a Harvest Host farm between Gettysburg and Valley Forge just outside of York, PA.  I was bummed because the farm had a market with all sorts of stuff I wanted, but they closed at 4PM on Saturday and didn’t open on Sunday, so when we arrived after 4PM I couldn’t shop.  It was, however, a pleasant and quiet place to park and we had a good night’s sleep before heading to Valley Forge.

​Valley Forge National Military Park is another place Tom and I had both visited as kids but didn’t really remember.  My parents were big into experiencing realism, so most of what I remembered about Valley Forge was it being cold and gray since for some reason we always went in the winter so we could feel what Washington’s troops felt.  It was a much more pleasant experience on a gorgeous fall day, and Valley Forge now has a ~5 mile loop trail that runs around the site.  Like Gettysburg, the site has been maintained so visitors can envision what it was like at the time it was historically significant, so it’s much like it was in the winter of 1777/78 when Washington’s troops were there, but unlike Gettysburg it’s more about historical buildings than endless monuments.  Also unlike Gettysburg, the woodland trails were open, so we were able to take a nice walk through the fall woods which we couldn’t do in Gettysburg because those trails were closed for conservation reasons.

​In the morning, we temporarily bypassed Doylestown and headed for the PA Washington Crossing State Park by Bowman’s Tower, another childhood hangout.  We couldn’t walk the wildflower trails with the dogs, and we didn’t want to risk the road up to the tower with the camper, but we walked the towpath from the park into New Hope and saw how much things have changed since we left NJ 40+ years ago.  The old mill buildings are now posh condos and boutiquey New Hope now has some pretty fancy hotels, but the canal and the river haven’t really changed.  We went back to Doylestown and spent the evening with our old friend Sue, again reminding us that we shouldn’t let decades pass between visits with good friends.

What started in the plans as a night or two on Long Island turned into a little bit over a week.  Part of it was helping my Aunt Eileen, who had fractured her ankle and, at 88, was having a little difficulty getting around, but most of it was just taking some time to stop and visit and enjoy what we were doing, and as it turned out we had a lot of visiting to do between Aunt Eileen and family, her church family, and our friends Mari and Zoe from Belize who are now also living on Long Island.  And, after the harrowing drive from the ferry in Port Jefferson to Sea Cliff, we just needed some time to get our sh*t together and decompress.

From Belize to Long Island, we had been using the GPS systems on our phones, which was a combination of Apple Maps, Google Maps, and maps.me.  We’d run into a few problems where we didn’t quite end up where we expected, but for the most part those systems got us from point A to point B without any major problems.  However, as we were driving from the ferry to Sea Cliff, we followed the directions and found ourselves on a parkway with bridge underpasses that were barely tall enough - in the middle! - for our truck.  The ramp where we got on the parkway wasn’t clearly marked that low clearance bridges were in our path, and by the time we realized we were heading for low underpasses it was too late to get off the ramp.  We were lucky that nice drivers were behind us and blocked traffic so we could creep under the middle at about 30mph, and that there was an exit back to normal roads before the next low underpass, but it was tense, to say the least.  And, to make matters worse, as we tried to manipulate the GPS to get us to Aunt Eileen’s without putting us on a parkway, it kept routing us towards other bridges that were too low for our 12’ height and we had to make some, er, awkward turns to keep ourselves where we needed to be.  What started out as a 90 minute route turned into about two and a half hours, but we eventually made it to Aunt Eileen’s, where my cousin Karen had a delicious dinner waiting for us.​

Needless to say, job #1 was to find a GPS system where we could put our truck dimensions into the GPS to keep us off roads where we don’t fit.  Tom spent hours and hours online, and eventually ended up buying a TomTom Trucker GPS which allows us to put in our vehicle height, width, and weight, as well as the fact that we carry LP tanks, so we now run that as our primary GPS with the other map apps on the side to make sure it’s not leading us astray.   We’re now safely in Maryland, and so far it has kept us safe, as well as off a number of roads where we were probably seriously overweight.  It was nice to be in one place for more than a couple of days, and somewhere where we could take the time to have things shipped to an address where we knew we’d be for a few days. 

Besides getting to visit with Aunt Eileen and my cousin Karen, we had the great pleasure to get to know Aunt Eileen’s Sea Cliff church family.  Before heading to Long Island, my cousin Maria had called the local priest, Father Azubuike, to see if we could fit in the church parking lot if we didn’t fit in Aunt Eileen’s driveway.  We ended up fitting in the driveway, but Father Azubuike wanted to meet us and see the truck, so he stopped by after dinner the second night we were there - with a couple of bottles of wine.  Over a few drinks, we found out that we had a lot in common, being citizens of a country other than our birth countries, as well as many common interests and philosophies.  After our initial meeting, Father Azubuike came back for a dinner where I made eggplant parmesan and he brought Nigerian hot chicken and rice which was utterly delicious, and we spent another evening talking about just about everything.  Coming from vastly different backgrounds, we didn’t always agree, but that just made the conversations that much more interesting and engaging.  Aunt Eileen was delighted that we all liked each other so much, and that we all appreciated her bringing us together and being part of the fascinating conversations.  Maria planned to come from Massachusetts during the last few days we were there, and Father Azubuike ended up inviting all of us to the rectory for an African dinner with his Nigerian cousin Kevin, fellow Nigerian priest Father Hilary, and two African priests from a neighboring parish, Father John from Uganda and Father Nick from Kenya.  Tom and I spent that day hiking with Mari and friend Katrina from Florida (story to be continued below), so Maria cooked a turkey breast and mashed potatoes, as well as making cranberry sauce from Plymouth-picked cranberries. ​

Before heading to the rectory for dinner, Tom and I took the dogs for a walk and found a man with a flat tire on his Ford F-150.  Tom ended up helping the man, who turned out to be a Colombian named Armando, so he had a chance to practice his Spanish.  It made us late for the dinner at the rectory, but as The Good Samaritan, Tom was a hit with the priests.  We partied with the priests for about five hours (!) and near the end of the evening Father Nick commented on how much Tom and the priests were enjoying each other.  Father Nick asked Tom if he would like to be a priest, and when Tom commented that he was a) not Catholic, and b) married, Father Nick said that those problems could be fixed.  Not Catholic, is a minor problem, but as far as being married…​

The resolution was that Father Nick and Father John offered me 20 cows for Tom.  I thought about it, and asked if the 20 cows could be changed to 20 horses.  For 20 horses, it could be a fair trade.  However, the priests were firm that in their countries, they only traded in cows, not horses.  I also wasn’t interested in goats or sheep, just horses, so in the end we weren’t able to make a deal.  At the end of the night, after a lot of laughter and a few great photos, Tom and I left the rectory, still married, and Tom not a priest.  We left Long Island the next day, with Aunt Eileen proving to Maria that she could take care of herself, and our job was done.