Delaware City/Philadelphia

Yes I know, we just started cruising again and I'm already behind on the blog!

Delaware City is a small town on the Delaware River out in the country. It was nice to have our car there, we had taken it there a couple of weeks earlier from AYB. Our first day, we took a ferry boat to Pea Patch Island to visit Fort Delaware. The island is in the middle of the Delaware River. The Fort was finished in 1859 and during the Civil War it housed as many as 13,000 Confederate prisoners. The next day we drove down to Cape May, our next stop in the boat, to check out the marinas and see what was there. We found a nice marina and made a reservation for the following week. Cape May is a nice old town with many many old victorian houses. But more about that in my next post. The next two days we spent in Philadelphia seeing the sights. The first day we drove the car; traffic and $26 to park the car made us decide to take the train into Philly the next day. Fifteen dollars round trip with the old persons discount on the train was a better deal. We headed back south on the train at the end of the day out of the Amtrak station. Ironically, at the very same time our train was leaving the station, the Amtrak train that derailed north of Philadelphia was leaving the same station. When we got back to the boat we saw the train wreck on the TV and we all felt uneasy about our train trip. The rest of our week at Delaware City was spent working on the boat and finding a place to store the car for a month. We will retrieve it once we are in New York on the Hudson. On Friday, May 15 we left Delaware City headed down Delaware Bay in open water to Cape May.

Fort Delaware. 

Rifle demonstration.

Philly Cheesesteak.

Liberty Bell.

Independence Hall.

Amtrak Station.

Philadelphia City Hall.

Headed North

At 11:00 AM on Saturday May 2, 2015 we left Atlantic Yacht Basin (AYB) in Chesapeake, VA headed north up Chesapeake Bay. AYB had kept INA dry and safe for the winter but now it was time to start moving again. Our general itinerary for 2015 is as follows: We will head up Chesapeake Bay stopping at Delaware City, Cape May, Atlantic City and getting to New York City the last part of May. We are planning to spend two to three weeks in NYC and then maybe a week or more on Long Island Sound before heading up the Hudson River. Towards the end of June we will be up the Hudson and will enter the Erie Canal at Waterford, NY. We will travel the length of the Erie Canal, about 395 miles, to Buffalo, NY. We will leave the boat in Brewerton, NY at the end of September for the winter.

Our first travel day was a short one arriving at Hampton, VA in the afternoon.  We had a quick dinner at the marina restaurant with our friends from R Island who are cruising with us. We got to bed early. The next morning we left just after sunrise for the 51 mile trip to Deltaville. We layed up there a couple of days because of weather. On Wednesday, May 6th we left Deltaville about 6:15AM headed to Solomon's Island, MD and had great dinner at the CD Cafe a restaurant we had eaten at last summer. With the weather looking good the next day we headed out with calm seas to Annapolis, MD. Annapolis is a great little town and we enjoyed a last walk around the downtown streets and a chocolate coconut ice cream cone from the Annapolis Ice Cream Company.  The weather still looking good and a favorable tide we left Annapolis traveling 79 miles up the bay and across the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to Delaware City, DE. 79 miles is a long day for us! We plan to stay here a week going several days to Philadelphia to see the sites. So far we have traveled 276 miles from Atlantic Yacht Basin up Chesapeake Bay across the canal to the Delaware River.

Leaving AYB. Moving again!

Our first night at Hampton. 

 On the bay. 

Dinner with fellow loopers. 

Leaving Annapolis. 

The Bay Bridge.

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.