Hank – Today we have accommodations courtesy of our WarmShowers hosts, Dave and Barbara, in Wilmington, Delaware. We made our way through downtown Philadelphia and stopped a couple miles away to do our laundry. Once done we got out of the city and into the suburbs. We cut through the wildlife reserve on a trail that got rougher and rougher. Once done with that we didn’t mind being back in traffic again because the road was a much smoother ride.

We stopped at Denny’s for a late lunch. From there we only had about 12 miles to Dave and Barbara’s house. But we weren’t meeting them there until after 5:30 pm so we took our sweet time. Crossing the Delaware border gave us state #23. Whoo-hoo!

Dave and Barbara’s are fellow tourers. Barbara had a meeting to go to at church so we didn’t get to spend much time with her. We traded stories with Dave and he provided us some intel on tomorrow’s ride, a 60-miler to Susquehanna State Park. We almost stayed up too late talking but we have to get an early start tomorrow because our long day will also have some serious climbing during the last 20 miles. We had a very enjoyable evening together.

Kathy – We really enjoyed our time in Philadelphia, such a great city. Our 28-mile ride was a mix of traffic filled roads with nice shoulders at times and other times no shoulder. We were happy to find the wildlife refuge area to ride though to take a break from traffic. Well, that didn’t turn out too good. It started out with newly laid thick pebble rocks do you have to be careful not to fall off the bike in this stuff. Then it changed to a mix of very large rocks that pounded hard on your backside with every turn of the pedals. And of course they added a lot of thick mud too. Happy I did not fall over during this 3 – 5 mile portion of our ride. As Hank said, we were happy to be back in traffic.

Well here we are in Delaware, our 23rd state! We have some super nice Warm Showers host Dave and Barbara. We really enjoyed our evening with them discussing families times and swapping bike touring stories. What wonderful host they are.