This was another rather long day. We toured Baltimore in the morning (or in the part of the morning which was left after we finally got up) and had a run of very bad luck accidentally turning onto really scary ghetto streets. I have a pretty high tolerance for frightening neighborhoods, but these were like Detroit scale…
Despite all this, Baltimore is still one of my favorite places. I’ve been spending time in the region since I was a kid, and I fell in love with the city itself when my friend Duncan lived there in the late 1980s. It’s such a strange hybrid of southern and northern, and it’s just plain purty, even the decay…
Anyway, we finally found our way out and had lunch before touring the more comforting northeastern side of town, finding that the neighborhood we like in just about every other city also exists in Baltimore, along Harford and Belair Roads near Northern Parkway and the Overlea Diner, where we wouldn’t actually eat until the return trip a few days later…
We finally left Baltimore by 3:00 or so, thinking it would be about seven hours to Albany. We were a little off on the timing, and all the assorted turnpikes were absolute raging nightmares. There were, however, some bright moments, at least for me. I got my Roy Rogers fix, and also got to romp through an actual A&P in New Jersey. And Mark marvelled at a well-stocked Stop & Shop in New York…
Finally, sometime around 1:00 in the morning, we arrived in Schenectady at Duncan and Rick‘s house…