DELAWARE: STATE HIGH POINT

In April 2016 we flew to New York City to visit our son, who is a student there. We went a day before he was available so that we could do a little traveling to neighboring states. Bob had several items on his bucket list that he wanted to cross off.

We flew into JFK and picked up a rental car, then got on our way.

It was fun to see one of the famous Brooklyn exit signs. Brooklyn has a very unique personality, that's for sure.

It was a beautiful day for a drive, and we had 135 miles to go to our first destination.

We were on our way to to Delaware high point, 6.5 miles north of downtown Wilmington in northern New Castle County and within a few feet of the Pennsylvania state line. We made several wrong turns on the final approach. It's not like we could see a mountain, a hill, or even a rise in front of us. Eventually we found this robin's egg blue sign:

"Ebright" is the name of the street that dead-ends into the sign. The word "azimuth" means "the angle of horizontal deviation, measured clockwise, of a bearing from a standard direction, as north or south."  A "bench mark," referred to on the sign, is "a marked point of assumed or known elevation from which other elevations may be established." Does this make sense to you? Yeah, me neither. However, this spot is listed as the state high point, even though we were only "in the vicinity of the highest natural elevation in the state." Maybe the exact high point changes from year to year based on roots pushing up sections of the ground, etc.

I wouldn't say the Delaware High Point was the high point of our trip, but it has its own kooky appeal.

It looks like hyacinths do well at high elevations like 447.85 feet above sea level. I was glad to have something to look at:

Only Florida's high point (345 feet above sea level) sits at a lower elevation that Delaware's.