They say you're sometimes blind to the neat things in your own backyard, that you have to go away first and come back again to see them with fresh eyes.

I took a couple of days off recently and spent most of a day at Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania.

Now I had lived in Pennsylvania for a quarter of a century before moving to New England, and I had no idea DWG was there, tucked away on the banks of the Delaware River.

I'd seen the highway signs numerous times, but I thought it was a military reservation, or just a "water gap" - whatever that was.

Turns out, I guess, its a gap between the mountains where the water flows deep. If it isn't, that's close enough. It also turns out Delaware Water Gap is a town, with some neat old places, a town you have to look for to find.

Turns out some people did. Famous people. Like Lucille Ball. And Jackie Gleason. And Mr. Green Jeans (whose real name was Hugh "Lumpy" Brannum). And Fred Waring - the band leader for Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, but maybe you need to be a Keystoner to know that name.

Anyway, they all owned houses in DWG. They saw it as a great getaway, a Nowheresville where you wouldn't be bothered, not like Sarasota, N.Y., the vacation mecca to the west for many a big star.

I even shot pool in a bar where Jackie Gleason spent a lot of time shooting pool. Or so the story goes.

I also saw the spot where the grand hotel burned to the ground, and the train ran off the tracks and into the river, and the cold air cave which sends out so much chilled air a tavern was built that backed up to the cave opening and they used it in the summer to cool off their patrons.

I learned a lot of this on a trolley tour of the area, something I never, ever do.

But that's what holidays are for - doing things you don't normally do.

Speaking of that, I also rode my bicycle in a velodrome for the first time. It was between rain showers, so I didn't go fast and I didn't go high on the slippery track.

I wouldn't have anyway, even if the sun was shining.

It was just something different to do on vacation. Like you're supposed to.

Feedback

I wrote last week about, and quoted from, the letters Edgar Allen Poe wrote to an aspiring poet who lived on a farm in Attleboro.

He was Abijah Metcalf Ide Jr., the son of Chloe Read and Abijah Metcalf Ide, and he was born in 1825. Before he died in 1873, he had been a farmer, an editor, an author and a poet

I have since found out that you can read copies of his half dozen letters to Poe at http://eapoe.org/.people/ideam.htm.

Thanks for the cuddlers

Thanks to the person who dropped off two stuffed animals for Bears on Board, a program of the Attleboro Area Council for Children.

The bears - new, please - are given to police officers, firefighters and ambulance crews to give to children in crises.

Our teddy bear total to date is 5,441.

Thanks for the papers

"Brought some papers from a recent bus tour from Seattle to San Francisco," writes Ken Ramsay. "Unusually fine weather."

Thanks to Natalie Kerr of Plainville for an English-language paper from Egypt that she brought back from a cruise of Egypt, Turkey, Italy and Greece.

See you next week.

ORESTE P. D'ARCONTE