Last June, Jon and I told our friend Lisa's wonderful husband Dan that one of the things we wanted to do was visit all of the NASCAR tracks. We asked his opinion of good tracks to visit as, being an employee of Ford Racing, he's been to them all. Cut to this January, when Lisa told us that Dan was able to get us tickets and passes to one of the Dover races. Cut to this morning, when Jon and I left our house for Dover, and, I believe, my first trip to the state.
We left a little before 9 a.m. (thanks, Mom, for watching Regan!) and, after quick stops at the bank and at a BK on the NJ Turnpike (which was an adventure in itself), we arrived at the Delaware Welcome Center on the Maryland border around 3 p.m. (As for the BK - it was weird. It was almost cafeteria style. They had out several options, but not all, and there was no real system for what you should do if you wanted something that wasn't already out -- in my case, a Whopper Jr. with no onion. Yet there was someone to pour drinks, the one thing, if anything, that we could easily do ourselves.) We looked at a couple of brochures, but found that all the historic houses and places either closed at 3 or 4, other than one place open until 4:30 - the Hagley Museum and Library, where the du Pont family of DuPont chemicals fame lived for four generations.
The place is huge - we could easily have spent several hours there, exploring the places where they used to make gunpowder and "workers hill," but since we only had an hour, we were only about to see the family home, Eleutherian Mills. The house had a lot of nice pieces, but also very light - it didn't have the dark, ugly wallpaper you usually see in these place. This is definitely a place I'd like to go back to!
Since it was still light out, we sought out a state park. The one that sounded the best, Fort Delaware State Park, was closed for the season, and the one we found, Fort DuPont State Park, was super lame. It was off the end of what looked like an old military base, although there were signs at least one building is still occupied by the Civil Air Patrol, and was pretty much 20 feet of an unofficial fishing dock, with a sign warning of old grenades potentially afoot.
A brochure Jon had picked up described a 2.5 mile walking path in New Castle so we went there next. There wasn't much along the waterfront, but the historic shopping area reminded me a lot of Williamsburg. It was now after 6 and we were getting hungry, so we decided to stop at Jessop's Tavern, which featured wait staff in costumes and promised colonial food. I had the best Shepherd's Pie I've ever had. Bar none. My only complaint was that they didn't have free rolls. Who doesn't have free bread?
On the way to the hotel (just across the border in Elkton, MD) we called Mom to put in our fantasy picks. -- POSTED BY COLLEEN
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