Never mind. On to Delaware! Perhaps you thought like we did and couldn't name a single NPS site in the First State. Ooh. So close. It's First State National Historical Park and it's huge! Or at least the distances between sites is huge. Like a few other NPS sites, there are drives required between different units of this park.

We started at Fort Christina and Old Swedes Historic Site. When the Swedish and Finnish settlers came to North America, they landed in modern-day Delaware and founded a colony they called New Sweden. (Seattle resident's joke: I thought that was Ballard!) We saw the spot they actually landed and their church built in 1698. Old, right? We got lucky and got a personalized tour through the church for just a couple of well-spent bucks.

From the church, we drove south to the John Dickinson Plantation. John was the "penman of the revolution" and also owned enslaved people. Conflicted, to be sure. The plantation was nice enough, but more a spot to check off the list than anything else. We didn't spend much time there.

Back north, we got to the Dover Green and New Castle Court House. The Green is just a lawn and the Court House was closed. Bummer. We did walk through the neighborhood and saw a bunch of very old buildings and a really old street that made our road back home seem tame. (If you've been on our road, you know this street was in rough shape.)

The only part of the First State park we didn't visit was the Brandywine Valley. It seems like it's the unit we would have favored, given it's mostly trails through hills and forests. However, the visitor center was closed and we'd already exhausted our adventure budget by summiting the high point of the state earlier in the day so we left it for a future trip.

So that was Delaware. Maybe Wayne wasn't all wrong. We still had fun.