...this weekend, but thanks to all, especially T. Gale.  Instead, we bicycled
the canal (parallel to the Delaware River, along the Pennsylvania bank) from
Riegelsville to Upper Black Eddy and back.  The mini-Brooklyn Bridge at
Riegelsville is, truly, a work of engineering art, a low slung, triple span
suspension bridge.  The best parts of the ride along the canal are when it
diverges markedly from the flanking roads - some passages are nearly silent.
For those who haven't done this trip, this is a quieter section than that in
the New Hope area - where all the damn tubers are!

Upper Black Eddy was our turn-around point, specifically the Homestead
General Store, where we had lemonade and snoozed in the grass, as the canal
surface flashed sunlight on the undersides of the leaves.  A little farther
down, near Uhlerstown, there is a covered bridge crossing the canal, but we
didn't get that far this time.

On the way back,  I dropped my wife and daughter off to see her father, whose
Alzheimer's is so advanced that he does not really recognize her any more.  I
barrelled back to New York, alone, as the sun was setting on Philadelphia
harbor, including a couple of dozen mothballed Navy ships, including the
battleship Iowa, which would have been the location of the Japanese
surrender, but for Harry Truman's Missouri birth.

I have been taking sailing courses with a team of two people, including an
Iowa vet.   He says the only time he felt vulnerable was when the Iowa was
passing through the Suez Canal - as he tells it, they were down to walking
speed, and the canal was so narrow that anyone could have jumped off the
banks into the deck.

He was on deck when the charges went off in the forward gun turret, about 10
years ago, killing 47. In our sailing class, when we first go out, we always
let him take the helm first.

Love to all,  Christopher