A Week in New Castle, DE

Spending a Week in New Castle, DE | Visiting Fort Mott State Park, NJ | Road Trip to Chesapeake City, MD | First State National Historic Site | September 2025

The start of September found us at a new-to-us plant in New Jersey for a week. For this assignment we chose to stay just across the Delaware River in a hotel next to the interstate. Whenever we get sent to a new place, I always hope that we’ll have enough time to actually enjoy it before Curtis has to start working 12 hour days, and fortunately for this week he only had to work in the afternoons, leaving us with the mornings to get out and explore.

On our first evening, we drove to the historic district of New Castle for dinner and a walk along the Battery Park trail which follows the river. The replica of the Klamath Nyckel, a historic merchant ship, was docked here for the week instead of its normal port downtown Wilmington, so we were able to get a good look at that as well.

Fort Mott State Park, NJ

On our first full day in the area, we drove across the river into New Jersey on a mission to get two new counties. One we got just by crossing the bridge, the second we had to drive North about 20 minutes for. We’ve made great progress this year in New Jersey, thanks to crossing the bridge while staying around Philadelphia in April, and also because we drove North to South across the state in May. Now we only have 3 small counties that are basically adjacent to NYC, which we’ll worry about whenever we find ourselves back there.

Once we entered the second county, we turned around and drove South to the main attraction for our outing: Fort Mott State Park. This site preserves the remains of Fort Mott, an Endicott style fort similar to those we’ve seen across the East Coast. This site is in remarkably good condition and shows the effort that New Jersey has gone into preserving it. It also afforded us some good views down the Delaware to the power plant Curtis would be working at as well as Fort Delaware. That fort is located on an island in the middle of the river and while we were in season to take the ferry out to see it, we missed our opportunity by a day.

Chesapeake City, MD

On our second day, we drove West to get our last county on the DelMarVa peninsula in Maryland, which was just too far out of the way to get on our way here. We crossed the county line, then took 213 North just for a scenic drive through rural Maryland. Not wanting to just drive through and call it good, we ended up stopping in Chesapeake City for a walk around the town. We checked out the waterfront, then decided to walk over to the C&D Canal Museum. This is administered by the Army Corps of Engineers and was free to walk through and learn about the canal that connects the Chesapeake to the Delaware Rivers. The canal cuts right across the narrowest part of the Delmarva peninsula and is only 14 miles long, but when you consider that it cuts the journey from Philadelphia to Baltimore by around 300 miles, it makes a lot of sense. The original canal was built around in the 1820’s, though the idea was around before the Revolution. The original canal had a lock system before the whole thing was levelized, and the museum preserves a very unique water pump/water wheel from that period.

On the way back to Delaware, we made another short stop at Iron Hill Park and went for a short walk so that Curtis could visit the most prominent point in Delaware (which is different from the highest point in Delaware) and then tried unsuccessfully to find a local seafood restaurant that was open before Curtis had to leave for work.

First State National Historic Site, DE

Visiting First State NHS was probably the part I was most looking forward to about staying in this area, but we had to put it off until our last day because the historic courthouse was only open certain days of the week, and obviously we wanted to visit that. We drove back to New Castle and started at the visitor center, where they told us that tours begin at the courthouse at the top of every hour, so we rushed over to join the next one. It turned out that we were the only ones there, but the volunteer working there was more than happy to tell us all about the history of the town, the building, and Delaware as a whole. Some of the information was familiar since we had just toured the historic courthouse in Dover a few days before, but she expanded on a lot of the history. She has lived here most of her life, and even got married at this courthouse, and it was clear throughout her whole presentation how much she loves her state and what she does here. We had such a great visit and were so glad we took the tour! Afterwards, we walked around the historic downtown and returned to the waterfront before picking up some lunch and heading back to the hotel.

Overall it was a great week spent here, and we were so thankful that we had time to enjoy the area. However, we knew that in less than 3 weeks, we would have to come back here for the outage, which meant Curtis would have to work 12+ hour days every day for over 3 weeks…..and we were a bit skeptical that we would actually enjoy that. But that was a problem for future Curtis and Jess, because next we would be going back to the Midwest to another assignment at another new-to-us plant!