Charm City

**Disclaimer: I do not endorse, condone, or appreciate the facial hair represented in these pictures. I didn’t think I married a pirate, but perhaps I was mistaken.**

Jonathan’s paternity leave is drawing to a close and it was so nice having him home with us for three whole weeks. We decided to take advantage of having him with us this week and went on a little day trip to Baltimore. I never would have thought Baltimore was really worth a visit, but several people had suggested it recently and it’s so close that we went to check it out. The weather was beautiful and the city really was charming.

We started out at Fort McHenry, whose bombardment by the British inspired Francis Scott Key to write the Star Spangled Banner.

The children and me with a statue of Francis Scott Key.

The fort.

The flag flying over the fort is a reproduction of the flag that Francis saw. It has fifteen stripes and fifteen stars.

Lincoln thought being in jail was much more fun then Jonathan did.

Yes, Conan was there. The Moby Wrap makes him very sleepy.

After the fort we went to have lunch at a restaurant, L.P. Steamers, that one of Jonathan’s co-workers had suggested. While I’m not a huge fan of seafood, I do like crab and I was looking forward to a pretty crabby day in Baltimore. I was not, however, prepared to dismember my lunch. I’ve eaten crab out of a shell before , but I don’t recall having the entire crab plopped down in front of me. The waitress gave us a quick lesson about opening up the crabs and it looked simple enough, but I could not deal with the fact that the crab’s eyes appeared to be looking at me. Jonathan did most of the dismembering. We determined after we finished that, while the crab meat was actually very good, eating them this way was simply too much work. We’ll stick to crab cakes in the future.

We then wandered over to Federal Hill, a hilly area overlooking the city’s inner harbor.

Views of Baltimore from Federal Hill Park.

We had an after lunch snack at a delightful pastry shop in Little Italy called Vaccaro’s. I plan on returning every time I have to drop someone off/pick someone up from the airport in Baltimore.

From Little Italy we walked over to the Inner Harbor area and wondered around. We saw a cute little lighthouse that used to be three and half miles out to sea, some cute little shops, and the cutest dragon shaped paddle boats. Too bad Conan’s not old enough for paddle boats yet, they keep making appearances here on the blog.

We stopped to get dinner at a place called Koko’s Pub (the most delicious crab cakes you’ve ever tasted) before making the very short drive home. We didn’t complete our entire itinerary for the day and there was plenty we didn’t even put on our itinerary so I’m sure this will not be the last trip we make to Charm City.