Covered Bridges, Bucks County, Pennsylvania

Last Wednesday, on a crisp, sunny day, Jack and I headed off to Bucks County, just north and east of Philadelphia.  I'd seen a self-guided tour of covered bridges that looked interesting.  The weather was gorgeous and adventure was in the air.

We started at Washington Crossing, which is where General George Washington made his famous and icy  Christmas night crossing of the Delaware River in 1776.  We didn't spend any time there because there's no covered bridge.  But we'll go back someday.

Our first bridge was the Van Sant covered bridge, built in 1875 and 86' long.

Next up was Loux covered bridge, 60' long and built in 1874.

Then on to Cabin Run, built in 1871 and 82' long.

As we left Cabin Run, we turned onto Dark Hollow Road.  Wouldn't you want to live in a creepy old house on Dark Hollow Road?  I would.  There was a huge, deep hollow behind the road, so I understand how it got its name.

Next up was Frankenfield covered bridge, built in 1872, 130' long.  Are you getting a sense of mystery?  Dark Hollow Road?  Frankenfield?  Late October, just before Halloween, seemed like a good time for a stop here.

Then to Erwinna covered bridge, the shortest in the county at 56', built in 1832.

When I pulled the car to the side of the road to look at the Erwinna bridge, we spied three deer browsing beside the creek.  It appeared to be a doe and two fairly large fawns.  The doe kept a close eye on us until we left.  You can see the doe (which looks sort of like a kangaroo), to the left, but I can't even see the fawns.

The Uhlerstown covered bridge was next, built in 1832.  I thought this one was interesting because of the huge cliff behind the bridge.  Very dramatic.

On to Knecht's bridge.  We debated about how this should be pronounced.  I voted for a silent 'k'.  There was no one around to ask.  The map said that this bridge is set on the route of the Penn family's famous Walking Purchase.  

Sheard's covered bridge was next on the map, built in 1873.  It's 130' long.

Then there was Mood's covered bridge.  The original was built in 1874 but burned down in 2004.  This reproduction was built in 2007.  This was a fairly common fate for covered bridges.  I'm happy that people care enough about them to rebuild them.

South Perkasie covered bridge was  moved in 1959.  There's a wall of photos of the move, which was quite an undertaking back then.  It would still be an undertaking today, but we laughed when we saw the 'large cranes' used to move it.  Cranes are part of our business and today's giant cranes make those look like erector sets.  This was one of the two bridges not still in use.

How about this sign above the Perkasie bridge?  Don't you be smokin' yer segar on the bridge!

Nearing the end of the tour, we came to Pine Valley.  It was built in 1842 and is sometimes also called the Iron Hill Bridge.

The other bridge not in use is the Schofield Ford covered bridge.  It's in Tyler State Park.  The bridge was destroyed by fire in 1991 but was rebuilt.  At 150', it's the longest covered bridge in Bucks County.

And now we're done.  I drove the whole time because I can't read in the car.  Jack was a terrific navigator.  There were a few times when I had to yell 'Left or right, quick!'  There are small pull offs near most of the bridges.  Many of the bridges were in very rural areas, so traffic wasn't a concern.   Here's a map of the route:

We left Philadelphia at 10:30AM and got back at 5:30.  We stopped briefly at a park to eat lunch.  We had most of the bridges to ourselves, an advantage, I'm sure, of doing this trip on a weekday.  It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed being out in the country.  If you're in the area and are interested in covered bridges, I highly recommend it.  You can find more details of the tour here.

Tenting To-night - Mary Roberts Rinehart

If you're like me, you know Mary Roberts Rinehart as a fairly prolific Golden Age mystery writer.  I've read a bunch of her books and enjoyed them.  But browsing through the Travel section of Manybooks, a free books download site, I noticed that she'd written a book called Tenting To-night, about a pack trip she and her family had taken around 1917.  I like older travel narratives, so I downloaded it.

Rinehart, her husband, and her three sons hired guides and horses to take them through Glacier National Park and the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.  These were places that almost no one had travelled to before.  According to her, they were the first non-Native Americans to reach some of the places.  They took thirty-one horses to ride and to pack in all their supplies.  When you're gone for weeks and weeks, you need lots of supplies.  She and her family were, apparently, accomplished  horsemen.

The Rineharts were fond of the outdoors and had camped often.  They were also great anglers and were always stopping to fish.  Sometimes they were successful, sometimes they were not.  The boys, heavily armed, were also encouraged to shoot a bear if they saw one, you know, just so they had a skin or two for their college rooms.  They did see some, but, fortunately, they were apparently very bad shots and mostly just scared off the bear.

Although I've ridden horseback in the Tetons, I'm a tenderfoot.  I prefer to ride all day and come back to a hot shower, a good meal, and a soft bed.  The Rineharts, as the title implies, spent the trip in tents, if they were lucky.  Rain, snow at high altitudes, the occasional miner's or trapper's cabin, mosquitoes, deathly steep mountains and rock slides  -  no way would I do what they did.  They risked their lives, the lives of their horses, and the lives of the guides.  They considered the trip to be a victory, an accomplishment.

I was surprised that despite her apparent love of the wilderness, she waxed ecstatic about the eventual conquering of it by man.

Although there were interesting details in the book, maybe this wasn't the book for me.  I worried about the horses and didn't really care if she or her family disappeared over a cliff.  Maybe you'd like it better.

Autumn at Longwood Gardens

It was a gorgeous fall day, so we decided to drive out to Kennett Square (PA) to Longwood Gardens.  We're members and can visit any time they're open.  Would you like to come along?

Here are parts of the topiary garden.  Unfortunately, they're doing a major renovation of the fountains that are next to the topiary.  The topiary garden was closed.  The fountain garden isn't scheduled to reopen until next spring.

Every place you look, there's something lovely and peaceful.  That's primarily why we go:  to look at beautiful things and to soak up the tranquility.

Now we're inside, looking at the fern wall.  We love this wall.  If the demolition and construction that's made our lives a nightmare for the last 10 years ever gets finished, we'd like to replace the metal wall on one side of our  patio with a wall like this.

We're still inside.  Now we're enjoying the tree ferns.  Aren't they lovely, feathery and light?

I like waterlilies.  I don't know what it is about them.  They're  exotic and graceful and I think fairies live in them.  Or frogs.  Who turn into princes.  There are, at least, little fish that live in the waterlily garden at Longwood.

But my favorites are these:

Don't they look like something from a science fiction movie where the plants eat the people?  They remind me a bit of Venus fly trap plants that have a taste for humans.  I made this photo extra large so you can read the sign.  It takes only 3 weeks for the 'platter' to grow as big as 8 feet!  Whoa!  I've seen photos in old books of children or small women standing on them, but they forbid that today at Longwood.

Here's the conservatory.  The waterlily garden is right in front of it.

This is one of the chandeliers in the conservatory.  There were three hanging in a row.

Longwood was a 402-acre farm back in the 1700s, owned by a Quaker who bought the land from William Penn.  I believe the house in the photo above is the 1730 brick farm house.  (There's another farmhouse on the property, on the other side of the meadow, but it's fieldstone.)  His grandsons were interested in trees and nature and planted an arboretum.  In the early 1900s, after the farm had been sold several times, Pierre du Pont bought it to save the trees from being cut down for lumber.  Longwood is now over 1,000 acres, so thank you Mr. du Pont.  It's a wonderful place, well maintained, and the trees and plants are marked.  It's so frustrating to go to gardens without labels.  What is that tree?!  What is that plant?!

This ginkgo must have been planted by the original owner's grandsons.  I forgot to take a photo to show you how big the tree is.  It's big.  Philadelphia has lots of ginkgos along the streets.  They have beautiful fan-shaped leaves.  The only problem is that there are male trees and female trees.  The female trees have fruit that drops on the sidewalks at this time of year and it's the stinkiest fruit!  Stinky ginkgo!

The last few photos are the view across the meadow.  A few trees are starting to show fall color, but, if we remember, we'd like to go back in a few weeks to see if the color gets better.

I hope you enjoyed a few hours in Chester County, PA.

September Books

I read a lot of interesting books this month.  They ran the gamut from my usual preponderance of mysteries to an older novel, a book by a vegan runner, MOBY DICK (!!), and two memoirs of sorts.

     The Light Years  -  Elizabeth Jane Howard

     Eat and Run  -   Scott Jurek

     The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating  -  Elisabeth Tova Bailey

     Lament for a Lady Laird  -  Margot Arnold

     MOBY DICK (I'm sorry, I'm just so proud I read it!)  -  Herman Melville

     Murder in Stained Glass  -  Margaret Armstrong

     A Cat of a Different Color  -  Lydia Adamson

     A Great Reckoning  -  Louise Penny

     In the Company of Dolphins  -  Shaw

     The Blue Santo Murder Mystery  -  Margaret Armstrong

     Something Borrowed, Someone Dead  -  M. C. Beaton

     Widowmaker  -  Paul Doiron

Widowmaker - Paul Doiron

I read five books in the five days we were in Maine (2 days out of the week were travel days), but I've only read one in the three and a half days since we got back to Philly.  Mostly, I've been doing laundry, buying groceries, and going through a week's worth of mail and newspapers (for the crosswords).  Yesterday, Jack and I walked up to the library to pick up Widowmaker, which they were holding for me.  I read it in two days (technically, a day, since I started it yesterday afternoon, didn't read it last night or this morning, and finished it this afternoon).

This is a series that Elaine, of Random Jottings, in Colchester, England, posted about a few years ago.  Here he was, in my own backyard, but I had never heard of him.  Him being Paul Doiron, him being Mike Bowditch, Maine game warden.  Now I've read all seven of these books.

Mike Bowditch is a game warden who has trouble following the rules.  He's had many close calls and they've left him with both physical and emotional scars.  He's only 29 in this book.

Widowmaker is a ski resort on its last legs after a fatal accident involving poor maintenance of a ski lift.  A woman who works there finds Mike and tells him she wants him to find her missing son  -  who she says is Mike's half brother.  It could be true because Mike's father was a womanizer and a poacher and a general bad guy.  Mike balks at first and then decides he has to find out the truth.

Along the way, he encounters a couple of druggies and confiscates their wolf dog.  It's illegal to own a wolf dog in Maine unless you have a permit.  There's something about this wolf dog - his superior intelligence, his acceptance of people, his wildness - that gets to Mike.  The dog will be euthanized unless Mike finds someone qualified who will take him.  He finds a wolf rescue in New Hampshire, but, after visiting it, Mike can't leave him there.  The dog is domesticated but has killed a deer, so he's considered dangerous.  DNA shows that he's 90% wolf.

The boy who may be Mike's half brother is a convicted sex offender.  When he was 18, he had sex with his underage girlfriend.  Her father found out and convinced / coerced his daughter into saying it wasn't consensual.  Now the boy's branded a sex offender, on the sex offender list, but without a description of his crime.  He's been sent to a logging company that is the last resort for sex offenders who can't find work anywhere because of their conviction.  In reality, it's a slave labor camp.

Mike can't find the missing boy, but his bloody truck is found.  Someone decides to become a vigilante and rid the world of sex offenders and perverts, which is whomever fits their own description of pervert.  Was Mike's brother one of his victims?

The last several pages flew past as I raced to the end.  Which was slightly disappointing.  I like books  with all the loose ends tied up tightly and this one didn't do that.  Just a personal preference.  But, it was a fun read and very exciting in parts.  Snowstorms, wolf dogs, cross dressers, helicopter crashes  -  what more do you want?

Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Isn't this pretty?  Wouldn't you want to spend a few days looking at lighthouses and fog and crashing waves and sea birds?  Well, we would and we did.

We rented the most charming cottage in Cape Elizabeth, ME, for a week to escape the heat, humidity, dirt, and noise of Philadelphia.  The owner, an artist and gardener, met us and showed us around.  Her talents are obvious at the cottage.  The cottage has been completely updated and decorated in a casual, chintzy, antiquey style.  It has new bathrooms (1.5), a new kitchen, and everything you might need or want to be comfortable.

The cottage is surrounded by gardens, with hydrangeas, ferns, turtlehead (a native favorite of mine and the bright pink flower above), touch-me-nots, and other plants.  Our last morning there, we saw a deer up to her neck in ferns, just her long ears and dark eyes showing.  We watched the squirrels, chipmunks, and little red squirrels.  I will, however, never talk to you again if you rent the cottage when we want to rent it  -  which is all the time!

The road is private, so there's little traffic.  It's very dark and very quiet at night.  The cottage is less than 500' from a private cove.  The cottage isn't oceanside, but you can see the ocean from the cottage.  In the morning, I would lie in bed and watch the sun come up over the sea.  At night, the sound of waves lulled us to sleep.  I tried to buy the cottage, but she wouldn't sell!  I don't blame her.  It's paradise.

We walked to the cove every day and sometimes twice a day.  Maine beaches are usually pebbly, as this one is.  You could swim  -  if you dare to brave the frigid Maine water.  (And if you can swim, which I cannot.)  The ocean is endlessly fascinating.  There are birds and boats to watch.  The sea changes every few minutes.  At the beginning of the week, there was fog, which meant fog horns, and which made me want to watch the old TV series Dark Shadows.

At this part of the coast, the rocks look like petrified trees.  I was sure they were, but I found out they are 400-million-year-old silt formations.  They still look like petrified trees to me.

Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper both painted here.  Edward Hopper painted Two Lights Lighthouse, which is the one in the top photo.  The coast abounds with lighthouses, and shipwrecks.  Portland Head Light is a short drive away.  You can go to Crescent Beach State Park, Two Lights State Park, or Fort Williams Park, all less than twenty minutes away.  Two Lights was our favorite and the closest. This is Portland Head Light, which Hopper also painted.

Portland is less than a half hour drive and has restaurants, bars, shops, and is a nice old town down by the water.  We always stop at Gritty McDuff's because an old friend of mine used to bartend there.  Back in 1989, we were bartenders in Boston, and then she moved to Portland.  Cape Elizabeth has at least two good restaurants, too.  We were impressed and pleased by the two we ate at:  The Good Table and Rudy's.  C Salt Gourmet Market makes great sandwiches

There was also time to read.  I read five books while we were there.  I've posted about a couple of them.  We sat on the open patio in the afternoons and read.  Jack read his vacation book.  I cannot understand people who only read on vacation - and yet I'm married to one.  On the other hand, he probably can't understand why I can't keep my nose out of several books at one time.

Here are some random photos of the fog and the rocks.  Most of the days we were there, the sun was shining, but I, being photophobic, prefer the foggy days.  I already miss everything about Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and can't wait to go back.