-Thursday afternoon: pull into USAirport parking lot at 4:15. Flight leaves at 5:20... made it in perfect timing, although I don't think I'd like to test my luck that close again.-Thursday evening: Flew Southwest Airlines - cool airline, they don't have assigned seats so you just basically sit wherever you want to, and since the flight wasn't full at all no one had to take a seat squeezed in the middle of two other people. We landed in Chicago (Midway Airport - another airport added to my list) at around 8:00, and had dinner at the airport version of Miller's Pub, a restaurant that I had been to in Chicago eight years earlier, and had pretty decent fried cod sandwich (although being in an airport it was nearly $10).
-Thursday night: Touched down at BWI right at midnight, walked out the door and looked down the row of buses just as our friend was pulling up - perfect timing once again. Then we drove over to her house - basically a three floor hallway - two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs (narrow stairway, only one person at a time), a 'living room' and kitchen on the main floor, and then storage and laundry downstairs. After taking the "tour" and talking for awhile we hit the sack, being pretty tired from the trip.
-Friday morning started with me being yelled at by a miniature parrot - not a parakeet - at 8:00AM (6:00 my time) until I got up, which is a lovely way to start the day. But then we got going earlier and got to see more of the city. Our first stop was to walk around Peabody Music Conservatory where my friend went for several years for violin & viola performance. Just outside the main building (there are only two) is the large monument and roundabout where a scene in "Enemy of the State" was filmed, so that was pretty cool. Then we walked down to the part of the harbor that all of the tourists go - you could tell by the Barnes & Noble and the Hard Rock Cafe.
During some other random walking around downtown with no real destination we ran across a couple of reporters from the Baltimore news station conducting an interview on the side of the street - so perhaps, we were in the background of a news segment on the increase of cost of living due to trying to bring in more business and make the downtown area a little more upscale. After walking around the downtown area a little more we stopped and had lunch at an amazing Nepalese buffet and then went down to the boathouse - our friend coaches college & high school crew - where they keep all of the skulls and checked them out. They are so much longer in person that you would expect them to be. Pretty cool. After that we drove around Baltimore for awhile and walked around Fells Point where I saw my first Coast Guard ship. That evening our friend from DC drove up and we all went out to dinner at the Waterfront Hotel (a funky pub/restaurant in Fells Point) where I accomplished my goal of eating crab cakes while I was in Maryland. After dinner my roommate & I drove with my friend back down to DC where she had to drop off her car and then caught the metro to her house in Columbia Heights.
next entry will pick up in Washington DC
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