Dinner in Baltimore...

The drive from DC to Baltimore was pretty uneventful. There was a little traffic, but not as much as we expected, considering that it was right around rush hour. Since I missed getting a picture of the Welcome to Maryland sign, if there even was one, I figured I'd at least get a picture of the Baltimore sign that was along the road:


I also snapped this picture of a random building as we pulled into the Baltimore area:


I'm not really sure what the building was. I think it might have just been a restaurant or something like that, but I thought it looked kind of interesting.

We stopped at a little park and boat dock area on the south end of Baltimore, where we could get a few pictures of the Chesapeake Bay. It was the first time either the girlfriend or I had ever seen the Atlantic, or even an offshoot of it, so I figured I'd take a few pictures to commemorate the occasion.

Here's the first little glimpse of the Chesapeake:


And a little closer:


And this was from the park where we stopped:


There was a very nice looking drawbridge, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, I think, right near the park where we stopped. I snapped a couple of pictures of it, too:




Right next to the parking lot, there was a Vietnam War memorial, but we were just a bit too tired to walk over to it, and we'd already seen a ton of monuments earlier in the day anyway. Here's a picture of the flags in the sunset, though:


After we figured out kind of where we wanted to go for dinner, or at least where there might be some restaurants, it was across the bridge and into the city proper:


Here's the obligatory (for me, at least) shot of the river as we crossed the bridge:


And one of the big freighters loading or unloading nearby:



I tried to take a couple of shots as we drove through the streets of Baltimore. They didn't come out all that clear, but they're kind of "art shots," as the girlfriend says:




We drove to the first place we had seen on the map, Nick's Fish House. It looked closed, although we didn't really see a sign that particularly said whether it was open or closed. I walked toward the entrance and saw that the outdoor seating area was taped off with yellow tape, and there didn't appear to be any cars in the lot, but it still had posters up in the window saying that it was voted the best fish place in Baltimore for 2008. We decided to pass anyway, and headed back on the streets.

After taking our almost mandatory detour through the industrial underside of Baltimore, we eventually found a place called the Bay Cafe. At least we thought we'd found it. We saw signs and such, but the building where the signs were hung appeared to be some kind of lofts for rent or something like that, so we spent a fair amount of time wandering around the building trying to find the place before we stopped one of the few locals we saw and asked. Turns out that the signs are on the front, street, side of the big building, and the restaurant is in a separate building on the water side, pretty much completely hidden from view of passers-by.

It appears that the Bay Cafe is more or less a local hangout sort of bar. There was a "please wait to be seated" sign, but the only person working at the place was the bartender. And it was several minutes before we even saw him. There were a few people, seemingly locals who knew each other, sitting at the bar, but that was about it. When we finally found the bartender, we got menus to look over to see if we wanted to stay.

We spent a little while trying to figure out where we could get a crab cake, which the girlfriend wanted to get in Maryland. It turns out that they have a full dinner meal with a crab cake, and they have a crab cake sandwich, but you can't just order a single crab cake by itself. So she got the sandwich, figuring logically enough that she could just take it off the bread. I ordered the softshell crab sandwich, since I'd never had one of those before and it sounded interesting.

The meal was good. She wasn't that terribly impressed with the crab cake, although she said it tasted fine. It's just that it wasn't really all that much different than the ones that I made her with the frozen Alaskan crab. I thought the softshell crab sandwich was pretty decent, but I'm not sure that I'd get another one, based on the cost vs. the taste. I've had a lot of other things for the same money that I liked better.

In any case, with full tummies, we headed back out here to the car, we're just about set to head out on the road again, and we're going to see how close we can make it to Philadelphia before stopping for the night...

On the road out of DC...

On the walk up to get the car, I passed several more monuments and such, thought I didn't really do much more than snap a couple of pictures in passing.

The Holocaust Memorial and Museum:


And the John J. Pershing statue in the park which bears his name:


I got to the garage pretty easily, although it looked like traffic was going to be a total pain. There were traffic cops at several of the intersections, and I figured it would take me one hell of a long time to get back down to where the girlfriend was waiting for me. I set up the car so that she could sit in the back seat again and put her feet up, got the ol' GPS going again, and headed back out into the world.

It was actually a whole lot easier a drive than I thought it was going to be. There was a whole lot of stop and go driving because of all the traffic, but it was an orderly sort of logjam, and everyone for the most part was staying in their lanes and driving like sane human beings.

So I pulled into the little bus turnout without having my blood pressure too high, although I did have somewhat pale knuckles. She was surprised that I had put the front seat down and such, because she was going to drive us out of Washington. But just so we could get out of there, she climbed in the back and we joined traffic again. I missed several turns trying to get where I was going, but we eventually got ourselves pulled over in a little middle-class neighborhood of southeast Washington, where we switched drivers and tried to figure out where we had to go to get on the road to Maryland.

Once she was driving and I was navigating, it became quite a bit easier, and we didn't really have much problem at all getting out of DC. We didn't see a "Welcome to Maryland" sign, but that's not surprising, since we were kind of driving like chickens with our heads cut off trying to figure out where we were going in the traffic and such. But we do know that now we're in Maryland, stopped at a little gas station on the road to Baltimore, gassing up.

And we're back on the road again...