July 14: Up and over and up and over and on a ferry, too

I didn’t end up taking too many photos today. I did pop up into Delaware for a few miles, then came back west across the Eastern Shore to the highway. I didn’t stay on it for long, though, turning west at a sign for the Oxford-Bellevue ferry. It was not free (it cost $12 for Merlin and me), but it was scenic, and nice out on the water. I’ve never had my car be the only one on the ferry before (the capacity was nine vehicles).

The view from the Oxford/Bellevue ferry.

Merlin all by himself on the ferry.

Arriving at Bellevue.

After I reached the other side of the Choptank River (which was more an inlet into the bay than a river), I drove west to the tiny tourist town of St. Michaels, and then on to the point at the end of Tilghman Island, or almost to the end. The very end of the point is a private inn, and unless you’re staying there you can’t go all the way. I kind of wish I’d known that before I drove out there, but c’est la vie.

A pretty little church on Tilghman Island.

It was still a pretty drive. When I got back to St. Michaels, I ate a flounder sandwich at a local café, and then banana ice cream across the street at a little place called Justine’s. I haven’t had banana ice cream in I can’t remember how long, and it was delicious.

Then it was back to the highway. I turned off before I got there onto a back road the map insisted did intersect the highway a few miles further on, and it did, but a bit further than I expected, which was a nice thing.

I stopped at a produce stand and bought cantaloupe and big beefsteak tomatoes to take to Teri’s house, and then went up – and up, and up – and over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge (as opposed to the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel). It’s almost as tall and long as the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, but it felt longer. I think it might have been the traffic, which got pretty intense, and did not let up through Annapolis and up into Baltimore. But Katrina’s directions were very good, and I had no problem finding Teri’s house, so that was a relief.

Up and over the Bay Bridge.

Nobody was home when I got there, but Teri had told me where to find a key, so I let myself in, and she arrived soon afterwards. Katrina was a bit later because she’d had to have her car worked on before she left Pennsylvania to come down, but by the time it was dark we were all together, so that was good.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

July 15: An overwhelmingly enormous and gorgeous garden

Today was the day I finally got to go see Longwood. Katrina’s been posting photos of the huge estate garden originally owned and developed by Pierre DuPont back around the turn of the last century for a long, long time, and I have been drooling over same about that long. At any rate, I’ve been wanting to see Longwood for years, and it was the one thing I wanted to be sure and do while I was visiting here.

It’s a two-hour drive up across the Pennsylvania border to Longwood, and on the way we stopped at a place where Katrina knew of eagles. We saw several, and this is the best photo I got (cropped and enlarged to a faretheewell) of a baby eagle.

See the immature eagle? Although he does seem to be behaving himself.

Then it was on to Longwood, where we spent the rest of the day walking around in the 90dF humidity looking at everything. We ate lunch there, and got ice cream, and stayed until almost dark. I was absolutely exhausted by the time we left (according to Teri’s phone, we walked over five miles), but it was so worth it. What a gorgeous, gorgeous place. I think I’ll let some of the almost 300 photos I took speak for themselves.

The rainbow border. It runs from blue flowers on one end to red ones on the other. It’s *amazing* and long, and there were so many flowers that I don’t normally see because the climate’s so different.

I don’t remember exactly where this little dude was, but he was adorable.

The other end of the rainbow borders.

And one of a bed of gorgeous red cockscomb blossoms.

This little fellow is an anglewing butterfly. He was along one of the walkways.

A variegated hydrangea.

The Italian water garden.

One of many, many in full bloom waterlilies in the conservatory courtyard.

A lotus growing with the waterlilies. I don’t think I’ve *ever* seen a lotus in blossom before.

One of the many, many tropical plants in The Conservatory That Ate New York. Seriously, you could have fit twenty little Tacoma Seymour conservatories in it and still have room left over.

A rainbow sherbet hibiscus flower in the conservatory (there were a dozen different kinds of hibiscuses there).

The meadows. Which were also full of flowers.

A whole bunch of liatris in the meadows.

This is the atrium of Mr. DuPont’s house, and the biggest split-leaf philodendron I’ve ever seen.

Purple martin houses fully occupied in the idea gardens.

Flower beds in the idea garden.

And on the way back to Teri’s house we drove over the Susquehanna River at sunset. It was a great ending for the day.

The Susquehanna River at sunset.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.

July 16: Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Lebanese food, and way too much traffic, alas

I’m so glad I wasn’t doing the driving today. Downtown Baltimore is a nightmare to drive in, and they were doing construction on top of that. Teri was amazing to get us all through that and still manage to take us where we were going.

That said, I really liked the Inner Harbor area. We walked along the waterfront for a bit, and saw some interesting sights including a very odd piece of sculpture with a wonderful fountain at its base, and the weirdest trash collector I’ve ever seen. We ate lunch at a Lebanese restaurant (I’d never had Lebanese before, but it was close enough to Greek that I kind of knew what I was doing, and it was pretty tasty).

This, believe it or not, is a contraption that scoops garbage out of the Inner Harbor.

This is a sculpture celebrating Polish history. It had a wonderful fountain as its base, too.

This, I’m told, is the Bromo-Seltzer tower. Apparently the guy who invented it lived in Baltimore.

Then we drove around in the traffic for a bit more until we arrived at a park called Federal Hill (at first I thought Teri had said Federal Hell, and wasn’t that in DC, not Baltimore?), which gave us lovely views of the Inner Harbor area, and had a cute playground with a pirate ship and a screwpile lighthouse jungle gym.

An extremely bizarre sculpture, viewed from Federal Hill.

Another view from Federal Hill. That tan area is a beach volleyball venue.

The playground at Federal Hill. That’s a screwpile lighthouse (a common lighthouse construction in Chesapeake Bay), and a pirate ship [g].

Then we went to the Museum of Industry, which was fascinating. Sort of like MOHAI in Seattle, oddly enough. We went on a tour of the museum with a guide who was knowledgeable and entertaining, and who even operated some of the machinery on display for us. We saw stuff about canning oysters (and vegetables in the off-season), and a working machine shop from the turn of the last century, and a tailor shop, and a pharmacy (Noxema was invented in Baltimore [g]). And we saw a print shop with a linotype machine that made me feel very old.

The linotype machine at the Museum of Industry, and our tour guide.

My first full-time “permanent” job was as a display ad proofreader at a chain of newspapers in the Bay Area, and we worked in the same room as the folks who set the type for the articles and the ads. This was in the days before computers were widespread in that industry (I worked there from 1980-1983, and they were just moving to computers for part of the process when I left), and I remember the linotype machines.

Oh, well. It was a lovely museum, and I had a very good time. We were going to go to one of the last drive-in movie theaters in the country tonight, but there’s another thunderstorm booming and crashing (and, for a few hours at least, dropping the temperature to something resembling human) out there, so no movie for us, at least not tonight.

Mirrored from M.M. Justus -- adventures in the supernatural Old West.