Roaming Rosie

Lowry Park Zoo has always been one of my favorite places in Tampa. We hadn’t had a chance to visit since we’ve moved back to Florida, but the seasonal arrival of the reindeer seemed like the perfect excuse to spend the evening at the zoo. We met up with a friend and her 3-year-old son at 6 p.m. when they opened the gates for the after-dark Wild Wonderland event. The park was deluged with crowds of people pushing carriages and being trailed by young, excited children, and it really is the type of event no parent should miss. Parents Magazine has rated Lowry Park Zoo as #1 in their list of “10 Best Zoos for Kids” across the country, and there’s no surprise as to why when you see all that they offer for this special ... read more

Winter certainly snuck up on us! Officially I suppose it’s still autumn, but today was bleak and brisk and felt every bit like winter to me. Perhaps the cold breezes and gray clouds and the bundled coat to keep out the 40-degree chill were an appropriate setting for a viewing of a battlefield carrying the memory of so much death. I’m not trying to sound cynical, but I just don’t consider Gettysburg to be a very cheerful place. It’s an interesting place to visit and included a beautiful drive through part of the Pennsylvania countryside, so it made a great day-trip for us. Once we arrived, we started out with a free, 90-minute walking tour around the battlefield, guided by a friendly employee of the National Parks Service. I was freezing, and my hips didn’t appreciate ... read more

Located a short distance from each other, the Maritime Museum in Baltimore's Inner Harbor and the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum make for a fantastic day-trip into Baltimore. With family in town, we ventured north for the day, first visiting the B&O Railroad Museum, which is the birthplace of American Railroading and a massive museum of over 40 acres with nearly 200 trains on display. Then we headed over to Baltimore's Inner Harbor to explore the Maritime Museum, which really means we boarded and explored three ships and a submarine berthed at the Inner Harbor. First there was the USS Constellation, the last all-sail warship built by the US Navy, then the Lightship Chesapeake, which served in the US Lighthouse Service, the USCGC (U.S. Coast Guard Cutter) Taney, the last surviving warship still afloat from ... read more

We spent today, Friday the 13th, exploring the Baltimore Museum of Art during the grown-up version of a field trip with people from Seth’s work. A couple of art students had volunteered to give us a tour of the museum and discuss some of the pieces on display, but the formal tour soon dissipated into occasional casual conversations, mostly due to people like me who become easily distracted and wander off. I wandered from painting to painting and sculpture to sculpture, photographing whatever caught my interest. There were numerous intriguing items exhibited, and though I enjoyed the more traditional landscape paintings the most, the strange concoctions in the Contemporary Art section inspired the most critical discussions. And I spent a great deal of time touching and floating through and swimming about in the blue and silver ... read more

As I’ve mentioned (repeatedly), I grew up in Florida. And if you’ve ever been to Florida and trekked through the many wild forests or walked a wooden pathway over swampland or taken a boat through the Everglades, you’re likely to have noticed a threatening bane of the tropics: bugs. Big bugs, bugs that bite, bugs that jump, bugs that you can’t even see. I hate bugs. And so as we are exploring Historic Jamestowne, far away from the tropics, we encounter - ick! - more bugs. Just outside the Memorial Church, brazenly perched upon the top of a stone wall is this horribly huge… bug. I think, from later research, that it is a leaf-footed bug, which fits into the category of True Bug - really: True Bug. It should be Huge and Scary Bug. So ... read more