Well, I have to confess that I pulled a fast one. Mr. Q and I were off on vacation for the last week and half. I had pre-scheduled several blog posts to keep you entertained, and to semi-disguise the fact that we were out of town (for security reasons).
However, a little over a week ago we flew off to Philadelphia, rented a car and first drove to the Brandywine Valley to spend a week touring battlefields and gardens. We followed that up with a couple of days in Gettysburg.
If you aren’t familiar with the Brandywine Valley (and I wasn’t before we planned this trip), it is about 30 minutes from the Philly airport and includes part of both Pennsylvania and Delaware. We stayed just outside Wilmington, Delaware at the Homewood Suites by Hilton Wilmington-Brandywine Valley. I’m only mentioning that specific detail because I would highly recommend this place. It isn’t at all historic, and it’s not in a super picturesque area (although it is nestled in a wooded area that was quite lovely). I suppose it’s also not necessarily a bargain. But if you’re staying for a full week, and you want some space to spread out, it’s nice to have a suite that includes a sitting area and a small kitchen. They also include breakfast every morning, as well as dinner (yes! dinner!) on Monday thru Thursday. In addition, our suite was very nice and super clean. It was also really quiet, which we very much appreciate. we weren’t so lucky with the 2nd leg of our trip in Gettysburg where a school group of some kind descended upon our hotel and kept us up with constantly banging doors.
The staff at the hotel in Brandywine were excellent, super friendly and accommodating. We had a problem with our shower on the first night and the maintenance guy had it completely fixed up by the next afternoon.
In addition, there is a quintessential east coat staple right across the street, a diner!
We ate there more than once … OK, we ate there three times!
Another bonus is that this hotel was pretty much right in the middle of all the things we wanted to see including Longwood Gardens …
the Nemours Estate …
Winterthur
historic New Castle
and the Brandywine Battlefield.
Not only was our hotel only 10 to 15 minutes away from all of these spots, but the route to get to them was absolutely gorgeous!
Remember way back when I posted about Rustic Roads in Wisconsin?
Well, nearly all of the roads we traveled on from our hotel would qualify as Rustic Roads.
The roads were quite narrow and wound over creeks (sometimes with a covered bridge!) and through the woods with spectacularly historic buildings around every corner.
Or sometimes just the remains of a historic building …
Those are the remains of an octagonal school building built in 1838.
I wish I had been able to capture more photos of these amazing roads, but they were literally so narrow in most spots that you couldn’t even pull over.
We thoroughly enjoyed our time in the Brandywine Valley, but now we’re back home once again. I need to get crackin’ on stuff for my upcoming sale. I also have a long, long list of gardening projects to tackle.
So be sure to stay tuned for all of those, plus a few travel and garden posts with more details from our trip!
q is for quandie 
Glad you had a nice trip, sounds and looks great!! Hoping more info and pictures to come. ♡
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Thanks Diane! They’ll be coming soon 🙂
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Looks so beautiful! Thank you for this post. We are heading to Gettysburg in a few weeks and hope to tour some gardens. Did you have a fave?
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First up, I probably won’t get to my Gettysburg post before you go, so here’s a tip. Hire a licensed private guide at the Visitor’s Center. You can do that for $82 for 2 hours (1 – 6 people in your own car), or $117 for three hours. The tour guide actually drives your car and takes you all around the battlefield. I certainly got a lot more out of it than I would have if we’d just driven around looking at the monuments ourselves. You also have the option of doing a double decker bus tour, but the buses can hold something like 70+ people, so it won’t be as personalized. Also, the bus tour is $41 per person, so if you have more than two people the private tour will actually be cheaper. We did the three hour private tour and Mr. Q and my nephew loved it. I certainly learned a lot! As for the gardens, OMG, there are so many to pick from in the Philly/Brandywine area. Gettysburg is about 2 1/2 hours away from there though. Will you also be in Philly? If you can only do one, I would choose Longwood Gardens. I feel like it had the most to see. But I did also really enjoy Winterthur.
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I agree with hiring the private guide in Gettysburg. We did that when we were there years ago and it was fantastic! He was so knowledgeable and both my husband and 2 boys are real history buffs and he answered all the questions they threw at him. Also, not sure if this would help with the banging doors in the hotel, but we travel with a small white noise machine. It blocks out so much of the noise that used to keep us awake in hotels in our travels. It would have at least deadened the sound of the doors.
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Oh, we had our white noise going. I don’t leave home without it 😉 Well, these days I use an app on my phone, so it’s always with me. I turned up the white noise (although technically we usually go with the brown noise option), but it still didn’t drown out those doors! Oh well, at least that was only one night. But back to the private guide, totally worth it for sure!
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You are going to get me to like travel yet lol. You always make these trips sound so inviting. And you take the beautiful pictures. Thank you for sharing.
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This trip was absolutely so inviting! It was easy peasy to fly just a little over two hours to Philly, grab the Hertz rental car (if you download the app you can go straight to your car and you don’t even have to stop off and speak to anyone), and then drive the 30 minutes or so to the Brandywine Valley. The airport in Philly is on the south side of the city, and Brandywine is just a bit further south, so you aren’t really driving thru the city much at all which is nice. Then most of the spots we visited were within a 15 minute drive from our hotel. Truly, it could not have gone more smoothly. I highly recommend!
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How wonderful for you two! The area looks lovely! smiles, Alice
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I was really lovely, I highly recommend it 🙂
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