FROM ATLANTA, GA TO COLUMBIA, MD WITH SIDE TRIP TO FORT MCHENRY--May 6-11, 2014

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Clarkston, Georgia to Columbia, Maryland—Wednesday and Thursday, May 7 and 8, 2014

Our plans for this trip were to drive Rosie II to the DC area and visit with our Aunt who had been in and out of the hospital repeatedly, in the last couple of months, with heart problems and also to visit with my daughter and son-in-law that live near our Aunt. We planned to store Rosie II while we traveled and leave for the cruise from the Dulles Airport. All sounds good on paper, but as we were packing to leave, we got a call from my daughter that informed us that our Aunt had died and that her funeral was to be on Friday the 9^th. So, we shifted into high gear to leave earlier than we planned.

We spent the night at a Virginia State Park a mile or so off I-81 that we had discovered on another trip. It is roughly half way to the DC area. Left the next morning and arrived in Columbia, MD that afternoon.

Got lost again in Columbia, getting to Christina’s and Paul’s home. As I have lamented in previous blogs, Columbia is a planned community, laid out in circles and curves with very few landmarks. It is hard for us to navigate. This time, we were only one street over, so not a real problem to quickly call to find what we did wrong and shortly located their street.

Baltimore, Maryland and Ft McHenry--Sunday, May 10^th Mother’s Day

My grandson and his girlfriend came from Laramie, Wyoming for the funeral and then stayed the weekend visiting with us. Christina took the two of them to attend mass at the Baltimore Cathedral and then on a tour of the place. In the meantime, Paul drove us to visit Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore where we were then all to meet to enjoy the park for the day. It was a very pretty day and many other families had the same idea picnicking on the grass down by the edge of the harbor.

The Park has a very nice, but small, visitor’s center. After using our Senior Passes to get tickets, we watched the short video about the circumstances surrounding the 1814 battle in the adjacent harbor. It was this battle that inspired Francis Scott Key to write the poem about The Star Spangled Banner that was later set to music to become our National Anthem. We then wandered out onto the path that would take us to the fort itself.

The original fort was built in 1798 as one of a series of coastal forts built to protect the Eastern seaboard. It was rebuilt a while later into a five star shape when fears of a British invasion were realized with the War of 1812. After the British burned Washington, DC, they moved up the coast to attack Baltimore and were repelled by the canon fire from this fort. Francis Scott Key, a young lawyer, and another man were out in the harbor on a British ship trying to get a physician friend released from their arrest when the fighting broke out. He and the friend watched the cannon fire back and forth all night, and in the morning, saw the American flag still flying from the fort. This inspiration is what led him to write The Star-Spangled Banner.

During the Civil War, the fort housed nearly 7,000 Confederate prisoners. During WWI it was greatly expanded and became an innovative Army Hospital. Most of those buildings have been torn down. In 1925, the fort was turned over to the Department of the Interior and became a National Monument.

We spent a few hours wandering in all the rooms in the fort and reading about all the exhibits. Some were set up to display how the officers quarter’s, the rooms used for sick bay, the ammunition magazine, etc. looked. The magazine was really interesting as it was really huge on the outside with layers of brick and dirt forming the rounded roof. The inside was relatively small for the hopefully safe storage of gun powder. It was also interesting to see the names of the familiar companies stamped on the ends of the gun powder barrels on display.

For Mother’s Day and to celebrate my grandson’s college graduation, we looked from home for a seafood buffet for dinner that evening. You do not get much fresh seafood in Laramie Wyoming. The seafood buffet that we had enjoyed in the Baltimore Harbor was closed, we guess for good, so we found one in downtown Annapolis. We wandered around the harbor a bit before heading upstairs to eat too much seafood. Boy, can a young man put away the food!

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