Friends and Family

On our return from Troy, we took a delicious detour into Philadelphia to dine with cousins Barbara and Bob.  Our sandwiches at the Famous Fourth Street Deli were humongous, huge enough for a whole other lunch and they were really good. 

Barbara and Bob hadn’t seen Ben since he was a newborn and enjoyed making him laugh.

For Yom Kippur, the highest of Jewish holidays, we were joined by friends and neighbors Mark and Ellen who are on an extended RV trip.  This is a holiday on which we fast for over twenty-four hours and spend most of the day in the synagogue.  We were surprised to hear a talk from the American-born Israeli Ambassador to the US.  He spoke on Israeli accomplishments and briefly on its concerns.  We broke the fast with Jerry’s homemade blintzes and good conversation and a tiramisu brought by Mark and Ellen.

The next day we met friends Barbara and Don from New Jersey.  In addition to a lovely day with them we were fulfilling an obligation.  On our motor coach is a map of the US.  We have put each of the adjacent forty-eight states in their place as we visited them.  This kind of implies that we have actually parked the RV in each state, but we cheated with Delaware.  Last year, we drove ten miles through it without stopping.  To make up for our misdemeanor, we spent a day on this non-RV trip at Winterthur, a DuPont estate in Wilmington.

 The original home, built by the founder of the company in the 1880s, is now 180 rooms filled with an amazing collection of early American antique furniture and decorations from 1640 - 1860.  In the 1960s his son, Henry F. DuPont, a horticulturist and collector, enlarged the home, extended the farmland, and built a private golf course.  

He also collected antique wooden door jambs, window frames and flooring and installed them in the rooms of his home.  What might have been the floor boards of a modest house became the flooring of a card room.  He removed or found wall paper and placed in on his walls.  In one large room is an extended Chinese wallpaper of various pastoral scenes and no repeating pattern.

When the family could no longer maintain Winterthur as a home, they moved into a 21,000 square foot  “cottage” and turned the home into a magnificent museum.





 
He and his wife entertain a lot and had many sets of porcelain, silverware, vases, etc.

He set up whole rooms showing life in early America.  These tankards were made by silversmith Paul Revere. 




This beautiful staircase goes up three stories.

On the grounds are various gardens and a whimsical children’s area with a fairy ring and an upside fairy treehouse. 

There was a special exhibit entitled Uncorked that had attracted us to the museum. This exhibit included accouterments to wine imbibing and had some delightful quotations regarding wine.

Another exhibit was entitled Campbell’s Soup Tureens and had beautiful and quirky soup servers.

The four of us enjoyed our tram ride around the grounds and tour of the house as well as the chance to catch up on special events that have been happening in our lives.