New Castle, DE.

My first full day east was spent driving up to suburban Philadelphia to see the homes in which I was raised. My father purchased one for $30,000 in 1964, and a neighbor told me today they are selling for around $600,000. For some reason everything looked smaller than what I remember….

Just south of Wilmington (and a home I had in the late 1980s), New Castle, DE was first settled by the Dutch in 1651. It’s where Wm Penn first set foot on the North American continent in 1682. There is an alley where George Washington landed troops during the Revolution. This is just nuts to us history buffs.

New Castle thrived as a port, rail and turnpike town until around 1840, when a longer rail line was established between Philadelphia and Baltimore, with an intermediate stop in Wilmington. The community went into decline, and when I lived in Wilmington poor New Castle was practically a ruin, just being discovered, and the old homes and buildings, some dating to the early 1700s, then began a new life.

One simply doesn’t find charming Colonial (as we’d not yet been “discovered”) and surviving mid-19th C buildings like this in the PAC NW.

Tomorrow I’ll take the Cape May - Lewes Ferry across the mouth of the Delaware River and get ready to start pedaling westward out of Rehoboth Beach.