Labor Day Weekend in Baltimore
September 5, 2006:
I just got back from a weekend in Baltimore to visit with my wife's second cousins (any reason works for me!).
Thursday is when it all started. We hit rush-hour traffic going to the airport and our flight was delayed for an hour due to mechanical reasons. We ended up getting at BWI at around 12:30am. Nora (Pam's second cousin) was picking us up and was quite tired, since she still had to work the next day. It didn't help that we all stayed up and chatted until around 2am.
The next morning, we awoke to a note from Nora with a list of things to do. It was pretty rainy because Tropical Depression Ernesto was heading our way, so we decided to go do something indoors all day: The Baltimore Science Center. It was about a half mile walk in the wind and rain to get there, but we survived. On the way, I saw my first lifer of the trip: a Herring Gull (extremely common on the east coast but uncommon in Texas).
The center itself had the feeling of a children's museum, with a lot of hands-on learning modules. We had bought the whole package, which entitled us unlimited access to the center, as well as access to the Norman Rockwell exhibit and one Imax movie. The normal exhibits were about dinosaurs, weather, the human body, space, and Newton's laws. We have a picture of Pam laughing at a sign of the planet Pluto, which is no longer a planet. They also had a planetarium which we didn't get to see. The highlight of the day was hands-down the Normal Rockwell exhibit. Since it cost extra and wasn't advertised as being kid-friendly, we were the only ones there. It was quite an amazing exhibit; it had 3-dimentional life-size representation of Rockwell's paintings. We got some good pictures of Pam and I posing in famous Rockwell poses. At the end of the exhibit, they had every Saturday Evening Post on the wall that Normal Rockwell painted. We spent a total of 2 hours of our time at the Center in his exhibit. The Imax movie we saw was Alaska, which was pretty standard for an Imax movie: lots of wildlife and flying shots. It was still enjoyable. After the Maryland Science Center, we went back to Nora's Apartment.
While we're on the subject of apartments, I thought I would mention how totally different the housing is in Baltimore compared to every other city I've been to. It seems that most of the housing was built in the early 1900s and was never torn down. The entire city, it seems, is "row houses." I don't think I saw a single house that was more than 12 feet wide. The houses may have only been 12 feet wide, but they were 50-60 feet long with 2-3 stories and they all shared a common wall with the house next to them. It was an interesting experience.
When Nora got home, we went to dinner. We went to a local place called Mother's, which was a bar/restaurant. Claire (Pam's other second cousin) and her boyfriend showed up, then Nora's boyfriend showed up afterwards. We ended up staying and drinking until close to midnight. It was great being within walking distance of everything; I never had to worry about who was going to drive :)
The next morning I got up before everyone else and was antsy to do some geocaching/birding. It was still raining, but I really wanted to go out. I headed back over to the inner harbor, where the Science Center was, and climbed this big hill to where a cache was supposed to be. I was rewarded with the most spectacular view of Baltimore I could of hoped for. The name of the Hill was Federal Hill Park. I knew I was going to have to bring Pam back with me. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the cache. On the way back, I couldn't resist nature's call any longer, so I walked into a nearby 5-star hotel and went to the bathroom (it was really nice).
After I got back, we hung around Nora's apartment until it was time to go to Claire's barbeque. Claire's boyfriend, Matt, had just bought their new house (also a row house) and they had gotten a lot of work done on it. I commented on it being Texas colors because they painted the downstairs orange and white. Nora's boyfriend, Kevin, showed up, as well as Nora and Claire's parents, Kathy and Jim. This was Kevin and Nora's parents' first meeting, and it went well. While the party was going on, Pam and I took a walk in Patterson Park, which was half a block down the road. It was a beautiful, green park. We saw what looked like a Buddhist temple off in the distance, which I found out later was called the Patterson Park Pagoda. I decided I wanted to come back and see it later. Later that night, we ordered Thai food from a place in the neighborhood. Did I mention how close everything was??
Sunday was the big day for birding. It stopped raining, so I insisted on going to Cylburn Arboretum, the one place in Baltimore that I wanted to go before even setting foot there. On the way there, we stopped by Federal Hill Park again so I could show the view to Pam. We ran into one of Nora's friends that showed up at the Barbeque who was training for a 10k she was going to be running in soon. After admiring the view again, we drove off to Cylburn Arboretum.
Cylburn was everything I had hoped it would be. It had a trail through the woods with birds for me and flower gardens, gazebos and exotic plants for the women. We did the trail first, were I managed to pick up three more lifers: the White-breasted Nuthatch, a Gray Catbird, and a Least Flycatcher. All are visible at certain times of the year in Texas, but they are more common up north. We even got to watch the nuthatch crack open a peanut on the side of the tree and take the peanut out! When we finished my bird walk, we took a sit at a small gazebo and rested. While there, I whipped out my GPS and found there was a cache 50 feet from us, so I pulled it up and signed the log. After that, we went to the Garden of the Senses, which had plants and the "sense" that applied to them (touch, smell, etc.). I saw one plant called a "Sensitive Plant," that had the touch icon on the sign. So of course, I touched it! The leaves instantly shrank and retracted when it touched it. I called Pam and Nora over and showed them my amazing discovery and they both agreed that it was the coolest thing we had seen that day.
We went back to Nora's apartment and ate leftover Thai for lunch, hung out and rested and planned for a couple hours, then went back to the Inner Harbor. Once there, we got on a Water Taxi to head over to the big waterfront shopping area. On the way, I saw my last lifer of the trip: a Great Black-backed Gull. I also saw a couple familiar favorites from Texas: a Great Blue Heron and a Double-crested Cormorant. The shopping wasn't all that exciting; all the shops were pretty basic random touristy stuff. Kevin showed up and we tried to find a geocache in the area, but to no avail. We ate dinner at a seafood place called Shuckey's (as in to Shuck an oyster). I found a local beer I really liked called Clipper City and Pam tried another beer nicknamed "Natty Bo," which is short for National Bohemian. This beer seems to be somewhat of an advertising hype in Baltimore. They even had a shop that sold Natty Bo merchandise and there is a building with a winking Natty Bo mascot (which is a black and white caricature of a man with a monocle). After taking the water taxi back, we hit up a local ice cream store, whose name escapes me. I had the raspberry cheesecake, Pam had a chocolate raspberry, and Nora had some kind of peanut butter/chocolate concoction.
Monday morning was our last day I wasn't going to spend it in bed. I had gotten the geocaching bug and I wanted more. I got dressed an told Pam to call me when they were getting ready to go and I would head back. My first stop was at Oriole Stadium for a virtual cache. Then I walked a mile up to the George Washington Memorial (the first one erected in his honor in the nation), which is next to the church that Francis Scott Key (a native Marylander) died in. This one was actually a virtual cache "placed" by a husband/wife team from Dallas. After that was a long walk up to the University of Baltimore where, after some difficulty, I found a nano cache by the art building. From there was a short walk to Penn Station, where the Amtrak line stops. The virtual cache there was a hideous looking 60-foot sculpture of some kind of 4-armed man-woman. Here's a google image hit for it. I was about to head off to Druid Park when Pam called. By this point I had walked over 2 miles and I wasn't about to walk back, so I hopped on a train and took it back to the Inner Harbor where I met up with Pam and Nora.
We met up at the Baltimore Visitor's center, which had a lot of good information on stuff to do. I had wanted to go up to the "top of the world" on the observation deck of the World Trade Center of Baltimore and we happened to find a $1 off coupon in the Baltimore tourism publication. On the way over to the tower, we ran into Nora's running friend again and discussed how Baltimore was nicknamed "Smalltimore" for that very reason. I also unsuccessfully looked for another cache by the World Trade Center. We went up to the center and got a birds-eye view of all the landmarks we had been seeing all weekend. Turns out we were in the tallest 5-sided building in the world! Once we felt we got our money's worth we went down and back to Nora's Apartment.
Once we got back and saw how little there was to eat, we decided to head out to another Baltimore staple: Cafe Hon. Every year they have a "Hon" festival around this cafe. The term "Hon" is short for "Honey," or what old waitresses at diners call you. The food was mediocre and the prices were high. I didn't even think the atmosphere was that spectacular. I probably wouldn't go back again. After lunch, we went to a few more touristy shops on the street (the ones that were actually open on Labor Day), then went over to the Patterson Park Pagoda (identified earlier).
It was a quick stop at the Pagoda as we were all exhausted. We read the plaque, took a picture, and I found the geocache that was nearby. After that, we went back to Nora's and crashed until it was time to go to the airport.
The airport and the ride home was pretty uneventful. The plane again had mechanical problems so they had to trade it out. This time we checked in online the night before so we were in the "A" group. Not only that, we were the first in line in the "A" group so we got first pick of seats. Other than that, nothing special happened on the way back. Oh yeah, we got pizza for dinner.
And that was our weekend in Baltimore!
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