And then we discovered this……!!!!

Many a surreal oil paintings came alive for us in this picturesque stretch of land and for the first 15 minutes or so all we did was just gasp at the myriad hues of greens and oranges that blazed across the landscape. Our shutters soon went into a frenzy as we clicked away and our picnic baskets lay forgotten nearby. In fact at the end of our day, we had to drive back to get it! Not that we minded a trip back. We were just so blessed to live just a few miles away from this place.  The skies reflected the colors and the waters mirrored the skies. The place? The Delaware and Raritan Canal (D&R Canal). It is a canal in central New Jersey, United States, built in the 1830s and boy! were we glad to stay just a stone’s throw away from the place of mesmerizing natural splendor. The canal  served to connect the Delaware River to the Raritan River. It was intended as an efficient and reliable means of transportation of freight between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and New York City, especially coal from the anthracite coal fields in eastern Pennsylvania. Before the advent of the railroads, the canal allowed shippers to cut many miles off the route from the Pennsylvania coal fields, down the Delaware, around Cape May, and up along the (occasionally treacherous) Atlantic Ocean coast to New York City.