Girls Weekend 2022. A Hike in Brandywine Creek State Park and a visit to Nemours Estate

Brandywine Creek State Park

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

(Lori is writing today's entry!)

The last full day of Girls Weekend 2022.  Always a bittersweet day.  Sad to see Girls Weekend come to an end, but also ready to get back home to our regular day to day lives and to our families.

Mornings are nearly always the same on Girls Weekend. We get up and make our beds (every morning, we make our beds, no matter where we are), then sit down to our computers with a cup of coffee (sometimes tea) and check emails, social media and journal about our adventures.  We switch off the journaling, each of us doing every other day because we tend to be a bit wordy (you think?), and it takes quite a bit of time to gather our thoughts and to do a good job of describing our days.

When planning today after returning from yesterday's adventure, we decided we were going to go big and do a hike in Brandywine Creek State park and visit the third DuPont mansion that is Wilmington, Nemours, so that we could say that we had seen them all!

We decided to do the hike first.  It was, once again, a beautiful fall day and in a beautiful place. It was a little chillier today than it had been toward the beginning of the week, but after getting chilled yesterday, we both wised up and added another layer.  We did about a 2 mile loop hike where we were down by the creek on the way out and a little uphill on the way back.  Not long after we started the hike, Kathi stopped and was reading a sign that was on the trail, while Lori got waylaid by some mysterious white things on the branches of a tree.  Unsure if they were living things or little balls of white, fluffy stuff that had fallen from the treetops we took a picture and ran it through Google Lens (this is a fabulous tool one can use to help identify just about anything) to discover that these were, indeed, living creatures.  Woolly aphids. Kind of creepy, really.

woolly aphids

Once we finished the hike, we drove to Nemours Estate, to visit the third of the DuPont mansions and gardens that the family built in Wilmington.  The mansion has 77 rooms sprawled out over 47,000 square feet surrounded by 200 acres of French Gardens and grounds.  The gardens here are formal gardens, unlike the "gardens" at Winterthur.  Winterthur's gardens don't look like what one thinks of as traditional gardens.  The landscaping there, while deliberate, looks very wild and natural while Nemours' gardens, while spectacular, look more like what most folks think of when hearing the word "garden".

The mansion here is stunning.  And most of it is open and one can walk around pretty freely from room to room.  Each room or area has a docent that gives you information about the room one is in, in particular, along with with  information about the house and its occupants, in general.  I lost count of the number of bedrooms, but, with the exception of one pair, each had its own bathroom.  I also lost count of the number of spectacular chandeliers that are in the home.  It is said that the chandelier in the dining room once hung in the childhood home of Marie Antoinette.

It is stunning.  And there was not a speck of dust in the place.  Apparently a 3-man cleaning crew comes in EVERY day to clean and the place is closed for something like one full month of year for a deep clean, where every little piece on every chandelier is cleaned.

the mansion at Nemours Estate

We had been told by the woman who sold us our tickets to be sure and check out the basement.  She said this was her favorite floor of the house, so after touring the main floor we made our way downstairs before going upstairs.  Once there, we could see why this was her favorite floor.  One half of it is where all the equipment to run the furnace and the water is located, along with an ice room, where ice was made for the kitchen coolers, while the other half was Alfred DuPont's man cave.  This section has a dark room, an exercise room, a sauna, a billiards room, a two lane bowling alley along with his office.  One hallway holds his collections of items that interested him that didn't fit with the decor of the main living space of the home.  Things like armor and model boats.

From the basement we went up to the top floor where the bedrooms are located.  We had to go through fairly quickly because we were, once again running out of time and we wanted to have time to explore the gardens. The bedrooms were beautiful and the windows had magnificent views of the gardens.  We exited the mansion and wandered the gardens, which are absolutely beautiful.

Unfortunately, time ran out on us and the woman we bought our tickets from earlier in the day came to pick us up in a golf cart so they could close the gates.  On the ride back to the exit she told us stories of people hiding on the grounds in an effort to spend the night there (probably up to no good).  She said every inch of the grounds is monitored by cameras and anyone caught on the property after closing was arrested.  She also told us that one night a black bear somehow made its way onto the grounds and had to be removed.  

Once we left the estate, we made our way back "home" where we settled in for an evening of television and journaling.  We tossed the remaining 2 states SEVERAL times and each time they either both landed face up or both face down.  We were about to toss them once again when Lori's daughter, Meg, called.  After chatting with her a bit, Kathi put one state on the windowsill and another on the TV stand and told Meg to pick windowsill or table and whichever piece was on what she chose, would be where we go next year.  Meg chose the windowsill, which held the South Carolina piece, so South Carolina it is next year!!