A Saturday Drive

As I mentioned in a previous post, my wife and I took a drive Saturday out of necessity. With leaf collection coming through our neighborhood and, by mandate of the city, no place to park in our entire neighborhood, we made like exiles and aimlessly travelled the countryside.

After breakfast at a nice, '50's style diner in Pennsylvania, we decided to hit the road and find a winery that maps showed was near the DE border in PA. We knew where there was a sign off the main road that pointed toward the winery's direction, but we had never taken the turn to try to find it. This time, with of time to kill, we set off to locate it.

We drove for an hour. Like mice in a cage, we drove circles around the area, taking every combination of turns we could think of. The single sign off the main road was not enough to point us fully in the right direction. We finally gave up after exhausting all directional possibilities.

The mission wasn't a complete failure, however. We did find that there are quite a few exceedingly nice communities in the DE/PA border region. And there are more mansions and country estates out here than it seems an area this small could possibly support. Believe me, when I say "mansions," I'm not just talking big houses. I'm talking enormous edifices that rival anything I have seen with my own two eyes. As we drove past one after another, we continually questioned aloud who could be living in these incredible houses and how there could be so many! I'll have to start asking questions at work.

As noon approached, the time we could return to our neighborhood, we finally came across a winery by chance: Chaddsford Winery. Chaddsford had a wide variety of wines, from the typical, to the seasonal. We purchased a couple bottles before heading out. I'll have to report on their quality in a later post.

As we paid for our wine and were about to leave, I asked the woman behind the counter how we could find the first winery that we had wasted an hour looking for.

"Smithbridge?" she said. "Oh, they went out of business." Of course.

Fall at Chaddsford Winery. Chadds Ford, PA. November 12, 2005.