Pondering the world

I need help putting Christmas lights on my palm trees?

Several weeks ago we received a postcard from a company that specializes in putting Christmas lights on palm trees, and they were making us a special offer.

Say what?

Someone in their marketing department is a little hazy on geography, and I can't help but wonder how much money the company wasted in printing and mailing all those postcards to people in Albuquerque.

I can imagine the conversation in the marketing department went something like this:

"Business is down all over--we need to expand our market."

"We're already covering all of southern California and Arizona.  Where else can we go?"

"How about New Mexico?  Albuquerque has a lot of people.  It's about the same as Phoenix, right?  Hot, desert, lots of palm trees?"

"Yeah, let's do that!"

A very few people here have palm trees, the short, hardy variety.  We're more likely to have a little snow on the palm trees in late December than Christmas lights.

I know--let's go to Michigan!

Is anyone else enjoying those commercials that entice you to visit Michigan?  "Pure Michigan"--it works for me.  Lovely video and really nice narration.

I hope their tourism campaign works, because they're spending a boat load of money on those commercials.  We all know that the state of Michigan is not in very good shape right now, between car companies in a downward spiral and cities in dire straits.  It's not a place I would particularly want to live, but they're doing a good job convincing me to visit there some day during the six months or so when it's not snowing.

I wish them well.

Go, Michigan!

international date line trivia question

The screen saver on my new laptop is a flat map of the world that shows the Greenwich time zone and the international date line. I wondered why the IDL made a jog to the right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  What island or series of islands felt that it had to be a day ahead of others to the north and south of it?  So I went looking...

Kiribati...  Kiribati?  Where the heck is that? 

More questions than answers today.

Delaware is where?

Here it is, just what you've been waiting for... a map to show exactly where Delaware is.  See New Jersey to the northeast, Pennsylvania to the north, Maryland to the west.

The town I grew up in is in the southern part of the state.  It's so small, it's not even listed on this map. 

See the mileage scale at the bottom?  Compare that to the southern border.  Yep, it's maybe 35 miles wide at the widest point in the state.

It's the second smallest state.  Rhode Island is the smallest state.

At the last Census, there were still less than one million people in the whole state.

Delaware became a state in 1787.  It was the first state.

Geography.  It's a good thing.

someone needs to go back to 5th grade

The other day someone was asking where I was from.  She assumed that since we had moved here from Oregon that I was a native Oregonian.

Me:  "No, I'm from Delaware."
Her:  (perky) "Maryland?"
Me:  "No.... Delaware.  It's a state."

She was looking very confused by this point and I could see her checking her brain for mental geography.

Her:  "Well, I know we used to go to Delaware Gap."
Me:  "That's in Pennsylvania."
Her husband:  "You do know Delaware is a state, right?"
Her:  "I should know this.  I used to live in New Jersey." 
Me:  "Delaware is the state right next to New Jersey."
Her:  "Well, I haven't lived there since 1977."

Delaware is his favorite place

At a Christmas party last week I was talking to Bob, one of my favorite people.  He's been in the tourism and hospitality industry all his life, is extremely well-traveled and is one of the founders of the Albuquerque Convention and Visitors Bureau.

He asked what I had been doing and when I told him I had just gotten back from visiting my family in Delaware, he could hardly contain himself.  He had been to visit some friends in Delaware and fell in love with it.  He declared it absolutely his favorite place in the world!  He had been to Winterthur and some of the other historic DuPont homes ("castles") and described them in some detail.  He loved the gardens and was intrigued by the history.  He's seen much more of the interesting stuff there than I have, especially in the northern part of the state.

Even though I spent the first eighteen years of my life there, there are lots of things I've never seen in Delaware.  It would be great to go back and spend some time visiting my home state and acting like a tourist.  In the meantime, I keep working on this grand old house and making it a wonderful place for others to stay to see New Mexico.

Delawhere?

I just got back from visiting my family in Delaware. 

Over the years, I've been amused when I tell people I'm from Delaware and they look confused.

"Delaware....?  Isn't that in New England somewhere?"  Other variations include "isn't that in Pennsylvania?  Isn't that in Ohio?"  Yes, the Delaware River is in Pennsylvania and there is also a Delaware, Ohio.  But there is this little bit of 2489 square miles that is its very own state.  I can tell who doesn't remember their fifth-grade geography classes.

Granted, it's a small state, second only to Rhode Island.  And the last census still puts it well under a million people.  But still.

So here, for your personal education and delight, are some interesting facts and figures about Delaware.  Amaze your friends!  Astound your colleagues!  Appear smarter than the average bear!

being a tourist where I grew up

I'm convinced that when you're a kid, you don't know much about the place where you live.  Even if your parents take you places and try to teach you some of the geography and history, you probably won't remember much about it.  It's not until we get older that some of us start to appreciate things like history and architecture.

I haven't lived in southern Delaware for 33 years, and there were towns around that I never visited or didn't know much about.  Who knew that Milton has a Federal Historic District with 198 historic homes?  Not me.  Several of them are bed & breakfast inns, the Governor's Bed & Breakfast and The Victorian Jewel.  I had no idea that Milton was named after the poet John Milton or that it was a ship-building town.  Wait a minute... isn't Milton inland?  Yes, but it's on the Mispillion River, which dumps into the Delaware Bay, which goes out into the Atlantic...

Then there's Milford, with the Causey Mansion, The Towers Bed & Breakfast and the Acorn Inn.  [I'd include a link to Milford's town website, but it's very institutional--how to pay your utility bills and junk like that.  They give lip service to their history, but then go on to talk about how progressive they are.]

The town of Lewes dates back to 1631 and is an architecture buff's delight.  I'd like to swing by and take a look at the John Penrose Virden house.  I'd also like to go by the Bellmoor Inn in Rehoboth Beach because they're a Select Registry Inn (one of only two in the whole state).  [We'd still like to join Select Registry someday--best of the best B&B's.]  Rehoboth has some historic houses, but mostly it's all about visitors to the beach.

I probably won't get to do all of this during my short visit in December.  So much to see, so little time.  But it would be a nice itinerary for a field trip.

So... where do you live?  When's the last time you acted like a tourist in your own town?

going "home"

I'm going back to southern Delaware in December to visit my family.  Now that we own a bed & breakfast in Albuquerque, I thought I would see if there were any B&B's in the area that I might go to visit.  Innkeepers tend to be a friendly lot.  There are a lot of old houses there, and I thought maybe a couple would have become a B&B.  Either that or a lawyer's office, the sad fate of many grand old homes.

One of the things I like to do is drive around the town where I grew up (Millsboro) and the town where I went to high school and my parents now live (Georgetown).  They even have websites--who knew?  Okay, I have to admit that the "official" website for Georgetown is barfy, so I picked the "At the Beach"
website instead.  I didn't know that long ago Georgetown was noted for being "sixteen miles from anywhere," although it certainly felt like it when I was in high school.  Miles and miles of corn, soybeans and chicken houses...

What I found interesting was the history of these towns that I never knew, and that the names of kids I grew up with (Pettyjohn, Mitchell, etc.) date from the 1700's and the settling of the area.

After being gone 33 years, I scarcely recognize the place any more.  I can still find my way around, but the landmarks have changed a lot.  On the Millsboro website is a photo of Main Street.  It looks vaguely familiar but I have to think about where that is.  If you live in a place for a long time, you don't really notice the changes over time. When you haven't been there for a long time, everything looks different.  When did that building get torn down?  The trees have gotten so big. 

It's sort of like meeting someone you haven't seen for years, especially kids.  Somehow you expect them to look exactly the same as the last time you saw them, even though it's been 10 years and you know kids grow and change.   I send email to my cousin Sam and have even talked to him on the phone once, but I haven't seen him in about 40 years.  Somehow I expect him to still be about 13 years old, close brush haircut, and black rimmed glasses.  I suspect he envisions me much the same as then, even though I've put on more pounds than I ever wanted and my hair is at least half silver now.

Every now and then it's nice to indulge in a little nostalgia.  I think this trip will be spent with family and a couple of close friends, with a little driving around the place I used to live.