Every episode starts the same way. Footage on a timeline, questions I don’t always have answers to. Is there a story here or did I miss it while I was moving forward? Sometimes both. This one I got some help with.
Frank grew up in this part of the world. He knows the Delaware the way people know places that were theirs before they were anywhere else. When I told him where I’d been driving, he started filling in things I’d walked right past without knowing what they were. The episode you’re watching is partly his.
New Hope
Crossing into Pennsylvania on the way north, I passed through New Hope for the first time and immediately understood what Frank had been telling me about it at Christmas. The town sits right on the Delaware in Bucks County, brick storefronts and old buildings running down to the river, and in December it has a particular quality — warm windows, low light, the whole place going soft and amber against the gray of the water and the bare trees. I drove through slowly and took mental notes.
There’s a railroad that runs Santa rides through the winter. A hotel Frank mentioned that he’d heard good things about. An area north of town apparently known for its Christmas lighting that I didn’t find in time. Places like this reward the return visit more than the first one.
The Mule Tow Path
I was walking along the canal in Lambertville talking about ducks when Frank, a couple of days later, told me what I’d actually been walking on.
The Delaware and Raritan Canal opened in the 1830s as a commercial waterway connecting the Delaware River to the Raritan, giving boats a route through New Jersey without the open ocean. The boats and barges didn’t move under their own power. They were pulled. Teams of mules walked a narrow path alongside the water, hauling loaded vessels the length of the canal at a pace that was slow and steady and the commercial backbone of the region for decades. The path those mules walked is the path I was on.
Frank knew this. I was there and didn’t. There’s a lesson in that about who you travel with, or who you call after.
The canal today runs ducks, bikers, and the occasional confused travel photographer. It’s easy to miss the fact that this peaceful strip of land once moved entire economies. Slightly embarrassing. Won’t be the last time.
Lambertville
Lambertville on a foggy Tuesday in December with most of the galleries closed might be the ideal way to see it. I had the canal path essentially to myself. I walked up to the bridge being rebuilt — the construction worker I talked to told me it was over a hundred years old and ready to fall apart, which he said with the casual tone of someone whose job it is to fix things that are about to fall into rivers. I walked out to the middle, took a few frames, came back.
Lunch somewhere along Bridge Street. Great conversation with a couple of locals who told me the place is packed in summer and that I’d gotten the quiet version, which they said with genuine warmth rather than apology. I’d gotten exactly the version I wanted.
Washington Crossing
Frank reminded me what I was looking at when I drove across the Washington Crossing Bridge.
The bridge itself was built in the early 1900s. But the stretch of river it spans is where George Washington crossed the Delaware with the Continental Army on the night of December 25th, 1776 — in darkness, in a sleet storm, with troops who had been losing badly for months. The crossing led to the surprise attack on Trenton and a series of victories that kept the Revolution alive at the moment it was closest to ending.
I drove across it without fully registering this. Frank filled it in later. That one move didn’t win the war. It kept hope alive.
Every December they reenact it. Same river, same current, considerably more spectators.
Trenton
I don’t have much to say about Trenton that will serve anyone planning a trip. I took a wrong turn somewhere after Washington Crossing, spent twenty minutes driving through sections of the city in a way that reminded me why I prefer small towns, and got out without incident. Trenton has a story and I’m not the person to tell it in a fifteen-minute detour. I found a golf course near the edge of the city where the bare branches were reflecting in still water at dusk and I took some images that were the best thing that came out of the Trenton portion of the day.
Back Into Pennsylvania
I crossed the river into Pennsylvania in the rain and the dark, driving River Road back north through the fog. A horse carriage appeared out of nowhere in the headlights with an umbrella up, very Christmassy, gone as quickly as it arrived.
Pennsylvania proper tomorrow. State twenty-nine.
