Our Last Day at Homestead Farm Campground

This was our last day here in Pennsylvania. It's hard to believe we have been here for a week already. This is the second time this year we have spent time in Pennsylvania. Last July we went to Pittsburgh for a week for the Mennonite Church USA biennial gathering, then spent a week with our friends Leslie and Bill exploring the area of western Pennsylvania. This time we have spent our time in eastern Pennsylvania, but there is a whole bunch of this big state that we have not been anywhere near.

Of course, we did use part of our time here checking out Delaware and New Jersey as well. I continue to be surprised at how green the eastern portion of country is. I know it has been a wet spring, but from what I hear, the countryside is always green this time of year.

We have speculated wondering just how many people are actually employed mowing?! We first noticed it when we were in Louisiana and Mississippi working with Mennonite Disaster Service and have continued to observe it this entire trip. I get the impression that is there weren't people continually mowing along the highways, they would be quickly engulfed by the grass. I commented to Niece Daphne when we visited her in Virginia about all of the lawn they had to mow. She commented that it was actually mostly volunteer weeds! Unlike most housing in the west, there seem to be very few fences between properties -- and it's all mowed!

We've been a bit surprised by all of the agriculture we have been seeing. There are lots of fields of grain in various stages of ripeness as well as many fields planted to corn -- fields that range from a couple of inches tall to way over knee-high. We've seen a few fields of strawberries, some of blueberries and several fields full of cabbages.

Most of the communities seem to be fairly prosperous. There are not a lot of empty buildings or run-down properties. We've loved seeing all of the old tall brick and stone houses and churches. It is beautiful country.

ONLY Three States Today...

We had rain showers and thunderstorms off and on all night and it didn't look much better this morning. We listened to the Weather Channel and it sounded like we would be dealing with rain off and on all day. Given all that, we decided that we didn't want to take the train into Philadelphia and end up wandering around in the rain. So we decided we would take the Toad and go visit the states of Delaware and New Jersey.

Naturally, the first thing we ran into was road construction --

We had several miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic as we proceeded through the construction zone --

This was our one and only stop in Delaware. It was raining pretty hard most of the trip, so we got gas and let it go at that!

This is what it looked like going across the bridge over Delaware Bay --

As we got towards the other side, the rain let up a bit and we got a clearer view --

And here we are, catching sight of the "Welcome to New Jersey" sign --

We decided that we would go to see Atlantic City since we have heard so much about it. I should not have been surprised, but it looked like every other Atlantic coastal area we have seen. One house after another (many with For Rent signs) all the way to the beach. No easy public access to the beach without walking several blocks...

On the skyline were all of the casinos...

 

 Including a glimpse of Donald Trump's. We thought about stopping by, but decided that by the time we drove home to Auntie Violet back in Pennsylvania, it was already going to be late.

And indeed, as we drove towards Philadelphia on the Toll Pike, it was getting dark and the clouds were once again moving in.

It was an interesting day. We took more of the back roads on our way to Atlantic City and saw lots of truck farms -- most of them seemed to be planted to cabbage. The density of housing is amazing and the traffic is something else again!

We stopped at a restaurant in Franconia for supper. We had crab-stuffed portabello mushrooms with fried eggplant as a side. Neither of us thought it was very good. Our sweet, very pregnant waitress was distressed that we didn't finish either one of our dinners and insisted on comping us with chocolate mousse pie -- which was very good!