Delaware and Pennsylvania Trip

Kent and I took an overnight Friday-Saturday trip to Delaware and Pennsylvania in the middle of August.

It's only about a three hour drive, so our first stop was the DuPont mansion called Winterthur, in Delaware.

It's situated on many acres of property, so a shuttle carried us from the entrance to the house, telling us lots of interesting facts.

 This is the house seen from the back. It's one of the largest houses in America, so this is just a small corner.

 One of the DuPont owners had loved to collect American history art, and had a couple of nice portraits of George Washington.

 This was one of the formal dining rooms.

  The room decorated in Oriental style had this lovely grand piano.

 This unique piano was in a different room. (I always like to look at the different styles of pianos)

After checking into our hotel, we next went to Longwood Gardens, which is in Pennsylvania.We'd come at Christmas time a couple of years ago and promised ourselves we'd be back to see it in the summer.

 When we visited in 2015 these fountain gardens had been under construction,

 so we were excited to see them. Every hour they had a short water show with the fountains dancing, swirling and shooting high into the air.

This was a smaller fountain garden in a different part of the park.

 We were expecting to see more flowers in blossom than we saw.

 Here are some of the ones we found, but mostly things were green.

 The highlight of the trip was later in the evening after it got dark. The fountains put on a longer show, dancing with light and to music.

 On the night we were there the program was entitled "British Invasion".

 All the music that was played were pop songs from British musicians.

 It was amazing to behold and we loved it! The show lasted about half an hour.

I was actually able to upload a short video. I usually don't have much luck doing that on Blogger, so you can get a better idea of what I'm describing.

After the fountain/light show, we walked around a bit more of the park. The lily pads pictured above made me think of something out of a Dr. Seuss book!

 On Saturday morning the first thing we did was to visit a Pennsylvania state park commemorating the Battle of Brandywine during the Revolutionary war.

 Here's Kent standing with soldiers wearing uniforms from the American and British soldiers.

 The building above was reconstructed because it was used as Washington's headquarters during the battle.

 This room was set up to look as it did when George Washington used it as his office.

After touring the Brandywine Park, we went back to Winterthur to spend time in the "Enchanted Woods" on the grounds, since we didn't have time to do it the day before.

 This was a stone cottage with a thatched roof used as a play house, I think.

It had many cute details.

Here's a view of the inside.

 It reminded us of an old style British cottage.

This little house in a tree trunk was another fun place. You can see the little chairs inside it.

These mushrooms were a fairy circle, and if you stepped inside it, mist would come out of the mushrooms.

There was a little alcove for a tea party.

 And there was the giant-sized bird's nest.

We wanted to sit inside it to show how big it is. Yes, we're sitting on eggs!

On our way home we stopped in a the city of New Castle, Delaware. One of it's claims to fame is that it was the first landing place of William Penn.

 We saw this church, another of the original churches in the early days of British colonization.

The church has been operating continuously since 1689. Also in New Castle near this church is the "First State" national historical park. We walked around the area but never did see an official sign designating the park. As usual, we had an enjoyable and educational couple of days going back and forth between Delaware and Pennsylvania!