Country Roads, Take Me Home

The first stop on my recent vacation took me home to Delaware. For the past several years, I've traveled through Baltimore due to flight availability on the airlines I regularly use. Now that Southwest has expanded its gates in a number of airports, I decided to give Philadelphia a try instead. It's a slightly shorter trip to my Mom's place from there and a more direct drive.

It's also a trip back in time.

When I was a little girl growing up in Wilmington, DE my parents had a cottage in Dewey Beach where we spent most of the summer. The two hour car trip heading down Route 13 and connecting with Route 1 was a treasured scavenger hunt, each mile of the journey marked by sightings of my favorite landmarks.  As a kid, I knew exactly how close we were getting to the beach not by the mile markers by the side of the road, but by those familiar guideposts.

The St. Georges Bridge...
The enormous horse farm with the whitewashed fence outside of Odessa....
The roadside stand just after Smyrna where we would stop to buy sweet corn and watermelon....
The marshy smell that started just after we passed Dover Air Force Base....
The old boat painted to advertise the entrance to Taylor Marine around the corner from Slaughter Beach....
The pink Sea-Esta Motel that marked our arrival in Dewey Beach....

Those were the days before Route 1 was extended to bypass cities like Odessa and Smyrna, so the drive now is a little different, but I can still see those landmarks from the new road. And the land by the sides of the road is still pretty wide open despite plenty of new housing developments that have been built over the years. Still lots of room for the corn and soybean fields...

But the part of the drive I didn't appreciate as a kid was the sky. The unique colors seen only on Delmarva as the sun sets and dusk approaches. I never appreciated them as a kid because I hadn't been anywhere else to know that the sky is different everywhere you go, that no two sunsets looks the same when you view them from different places on this Earth.

One of the real treasures of leaving home is coming back and rediscovering the beauty right under your nose. As a teenager, I remember this small town world feeling restricting, like a place I needed to escape. As an adult, I know there is no place more free, open and accepting than the place you can always call home.