14.6 mi / 12.9 mph / 13 ft. climbing
Home: Doreen and Dave’s House

Now that we’d dallied until Saturday, we were able to get a nice goodbye (and photo!) with the whole Barlow family. The men were off to participate in a community cleanup, and on our way to the Mercado and Walmart through Georgetown we saw the crew working, and passed the police station, but didn’t get a chance to wave a final goodbye to any Barlows.

Then it was just an easy direct route west along the Seashore Highway to the Seaford area. It was a busier road than anything yesterday, but since it’s Delaware, there was a wide comfortable shoulder the whole way. Our 13 feet of climbing is our lowest ever. And yes, it was a short distance, but the (less than) one foot per mile rate is also a record. Delaware is flat!

When we rolled up Doreen and Dave’s driveway to their open garage, squeals of excitement burst forth (ok, mostly from Doreen). As the woman with the longest-running relationship/”non-relationship” with Rett’s dad, she would be the final interview on this completely-unintentional tour if we had actually been making a “This Is Your Life, Ken Harms” documentary over the last three months (over which we’ve now met three of the four most-significant women in his life, and seen where he lived his formative years on Long Island).

I spent most of the afternoon trying to understand why they had more Skaneateles memorabilia on their walls than an actual Skaneateles gift shop, despite neither of them ever living in Skaneateles. It turns out it’s mostly just that they love the town (as do Rett and I), relatively-independent of the fact that they know a guy who lives there.

Whatever Ken’s issues are with the women he’s been involved with (and Doreen should be sainted for being the only one who has maintained contact), they’re all awesome from our perspective. And Dave completes the pattern of being a really cool guy that all these women settled into a solid relationship with post-Ken.

For me, it was once again incredibly valuable (and fun) to get a view of my father-in-law through an additional lens, and Doreen unexpectedly could provide some “old photos” of Rett’s mom too (literal as well as figurative; she’s collected a great set of never-seen-before prints from Rett’s childhood). And then she cooked and cared for Rett (and me!) in a very mom-like fashion, something we’re both grateful for.

Day 2

Our original idea in Delaware had been to do one night with Matt and Heather, two with Doreen and Dave, and then head to Assateague Island. But then we did two with the Barlows, so that meant we could only do one with Doreen and Dave. Except…we didn’t actually have anything booked (thanks again, off-season!), the weather forecast still showed essentially no rain and comfortable temperatures for as far as it could see, and we’d had so much fun non-stop talking with these two yesterday that we never even got around to getting our load of laundry into the washer, so….we took them up on their offer to stay another night.

Dave had been hoping to leverage our stay into a restaurant excursion for a (non-)guilty pleasure or two, but unfortunately for him we apparently sided with the other half of our incredible hosting duo (Dave was doing a lot despite his right hand being in a cast from arthritis surgery). But staying in all day was far from boring, and I couldn’t get enough of hearing industry-specific details from the dozens of different jobs the two of them have worked (dewatering pumps, ZIP code machines, Baker’s scaffolds…), things that make our world work yet you never even think of unless you do those jobs.

To take someone you’ve never met into your home is a risk, and in both cases over the last four days, we’re grateful to our hosts not just for taking the risk, but expressing that the feeling of reward is mutual. Delaware is not just filled with awesome breweries and bike infrastructure, there are awesome people who live here too!