Month: June 2006

Av and I really wanted to be able to make it to Chattanooga before stopping, but we got sleepy about an hour north and stopped at the Athens, TN Hampton Inn.

In Chattanooga, we like the Chattanoogan Hotel and Av has stayed at the Read House, which is a historic hotel there. I wanted to see it, but I was just as ready as he was to stop before we got there, after all that driving!

The room was pretty average:

…but the hotel interior was different in that it had open corridors (like at Embassy Suites and some other hotels). That was nice for a change:

The #1 thing I wanted to do in Baltimore was go to the American Visionary Art Museum – it was really great, and also very different from what I expected.

Unfortunately, photography wasn’t allowed inside the building.

I loved that the first thing we saw once we walked down the hallway to the main exhibit spaces was an angel by Howard Finster. To me, visionary art is really about artists who believe they have had some sort of special communication from G-d to make art (religious-based art, like that of Howard Finster, Myrtice West, Rev. B.F. Perkins, Sister Gertrude Morgan, etc.). It can also come from people who have experienced dreams, visions, and the like of the future – not so much based in religion – which is something I’m not as familiar with, and that’s what made this museum so different that what I was expecting.

And I would have never, ever guessed that Rosie O’Donnell’s artwork would be included in a visionary art museum!

Since I couldn’t take pictures, I took notes of some of the artists I liked especially, most of which I’ll post about later…but I was really taken with Paul Darmafall, who was known as the Baltimore Glassman, and Andrew Logan, who is also all about glass and glimmer, and has his own museum in England.

After sailing on the Clipper City that evening, we went with six of our friends to Obrycki’s, which is a big Baltimore restaurant for serving steamed crabs. I sat next to someone who is a Baltimore native and an expert at eating crabs this way – so since neither Av or I had ever done it, she showed both of us. It wasn’t hard once you got a hang of it! The crabs were really good and we had a lovely supper – lots of laughing (and plenty of it was about my Southern accent, too!) and good stories. We had a fabulous time!

One evening, Av and I went on a cruise around Inner Harbor on the Clipper City – it’s a tall ship (the kind with those huge, magnificent sails)! I’d never been on a ship like this before, so I was really excited!

We sailed around the Inner Harbor for a couple of hours – chatting with other people, etc. – and at one point we passed Fort McHenry, where during the war of 1812, a flag was made to hang there so big that the British would have no trouble seeing it. It was after a battle one day in 1814 that inspired Frances Scott Key to write the “Star Spangled Banner” once he could see that “the flag was still there”.

It was really neat to see it the day we did, because our cruise was on Flag Day. There’s much more about the story about Fort McHenry and the flag here.

The day we went on our cruise in Inner Harbor, we stopped in at Lexington Market for lunch – at

Their crabcakes are the best (and biggest)

Besides selling crabcakes and raw oysters, clams, etc., they sell seafood to take home.

Following are several pics of Lexington Market – it was different than anything I’ve ever seen before – stall after stall of all kinds of food to either eat there, or fresh meat and seafood to take home:

Baltimore has this super-charming neighborhood called Little Italy – it’s wonderful! We had supper at Sabatino’s:

Next, we walked a couple of blocks to Vaccaro’s Italian Pastry Shop. They had a zillion different things, 50% of which I had never even heard of! We were still a little full from supper, so we got two cannoli to take back to the hotel. I’ve had cannoli, but it was *nothing close* to this. Yum!!