Gibson's Bridge and Baldwin's Book Barn

We arrived at our current campground in Embreeville, Chester County, Pennsylvania on July 20, 2022, after seeing our son and his family off to their new post in Lithuania.  It's been an enjoyable two years with them since they arrived in Arlington in summer 2020; but Covid has haunted their entire stay, upending expectations, plans and schedules.  We've done our best to help out where we can.  We've had lots of visits with our grandson and enjoyed everything from golf, to mini-golf, to a waterpark, to exotic dinners, to card and board games, and a few encore sessions of Camp Sharktooth.  However, now it is time to put our NaiNai and YeYe clothes away and bring out other duds.

We're here in Southeastern Pennsylvania for a week before heading up for a two-week stay in the mountains of Vermont with our daughter.  There should be lots of puppy time, a baby shower on the shores of Lake Champlain, a visit with our good full-time RV friends Eric and Ginny Lajuene in Cobleskill, New York, and other as-yet-unknown adventures.  While we're here, we're filling our calendar up with family visits, servicing the Jeep and visiting some of our old favorite Chester County haunts.

One small outing we have wanted the check out is the East Branch Brandywine Trail, a part of the Chester County Trail system.  As it's name informs, it follows the East Branch of Brandywine Creek south of Downingtown.  We stopped by to hike the trail after picking up Dave's cellphone, which he mistakenly left at our nephew's house where we visited for dinner the night before.

Summer is in full flower, but we still found one last daylily gracing the hillside by the trail:

 

Another pleasant surprise was a wealth of blackberry and raspberry bushes.  The blackberries aren't quite ripe, but the raspberries are very near their peak.  We had more than we could pick, right alongside the trail, a surprise due to the large number of people who hike the trail.  However, most of those newly minted rural-suburbanites probably wouldn't know a raspberry if they stepped on it, because one fellow saw us picking and munching and asked us if we were after blueberries.  So maybe most of these hikers come for a stretch of the legs or to walk Fido.  Anyway, we luxuriated in what everyone else left:

 

The highlight of this short hike was Gibson's Bridge, a covered bridge over Brandywine Creek that we hadn't even known about.  Also known as Harmony Hill Bridge, it was built in 1872.  It is one of eleven covered bridges that originally spanned the East Branch of Brandywine Creek.  It acquired its name from a farmer who owned adjacent land.  The bridge was substantially damaged by Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and took $650,000 and four years to be rebuilt.

All bridges exhibit the art of engineering design, but covered bridges display a certain je-ne-sais-quoi due to their history and quaint style.  It's always fun to poke around a covered bridge and see what it presents from all angles.

A pool with small fish has formed under the bridge, reminding us of our days fly-fishing for trout near a covered bridge on French Creek around 25 years ago:

The inside of the bridge is built of exposed wooden beams which provide their own aesthetic.  Below, Kathy examines them but keeps one way eye out for traffic, as the bridge still hosts motor vehicles as well as curious pedestrians:

Here is another view of the wooden trusses along one side of the interior of the bridge --

 

-- which caught our eye due to bright movements of light.  The sunlight reflecting from Brandywine Creek made a flickering glow, as this video shows. 

After admiring Gibson's Bridge, we decided to hop over to Baldwin's Book Barn, an historic staple of greater West Chester, which houses the largest collection of used books we have ever seen.  It has been a favorite haunt of ours over the years, although normally we have visited it in late fall or winter.  This time it is mid-summer, the trees are fully leafed out, and the day was hot:

We were a little concerned how hot the top -- and fourth -- story of the old barn would be, but the air conditioning cut the edge of the midday heat.  Even so, after 45 minutes or so on the upper floors, we had to move back down to the welcoming, cool lower ones.

As a bonus, we found a few books for family presents, but we won't provide more details than that.

We had to head back to the campground to get ready to have dinner with Kathy's sister in a Delaware County restaurant about an hour's drive away, which was a very pleasant reunion itself.

This day proved to be a wonderful reintroduction to good old Chester County in the good old Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which we miss from time to time as we roam on our RV adventures.  However, we guarantee more local color will be heading your way from other visits we make this coming week.