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Maryland State House Day 10 – July 7 – Dover, DE to Frederick, MD (188 miles)
If you’ve been following our travel blog, then you know that we call the lady spitting out directions from Claire’s Google Maps, Dorothy. Well, today, Dorothy had real problems. From the get-go, she was lost. It’s not a good thing when your GPS is lost. Uncertain where we were, Claire had to restart her phone to get Dorothy to reboot. Dorothy still had glitches all day. Who knows, maybe Dorothy went out and partied last night. She kept repeating herself (for example, on a 1 1/2-mile stretch, she must have told us 8 or 9 times to stay on that road heading toward a road that we had no clue where it was located)??? Then, we figured she was paying us back for talking about her because she took us through miles and miles of corn fields on both sides. This lasted even as we crossed the state line into Maryland. None of us figured this area for such large amounts of corn production. In among the corn fields, we saw a “marijuana flag” flying in someone’s front yard. It had a marijuana leaf where the stars
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Street Festival would be and the whole thing was shades of green. We were uncertain where Dorothy was taking us.
In Maryland, we drove over the long Bay Bridge over the very top of Chesapeake Bay (but nothing like the really long one with the tunnel lower on the bay). Soon, we arrived in Annapolis (established in 1649) and went to the Maryland State House. This is the oldest state house still used today. This is where the Treaty of Paris was signed to end the Revolutionary War. Annapolis was one of the first planned cities in colonial America. The brick roads of the historic area were designed like a wheel. The spokes were lined with 300-year-old colonial homes coming off from the main circle around the state house. As we were driving around, we spotted a street art festival down one of the spokes and decided to stop to walk around. We all made some purchases.
Our next stop was to visit the US Naval Academy where we watched a video and viewed various things about the Navy in the visitor center. This made us feel especially close to our Dad who was in the Navy.
In Glen
Burnie (yes, for those of you from Lenoir, just like the old bowling alley), we experienced a couple more uncertainties. A traffic sign said, “Calming Area Ahead”??? What did that mean??? Then we traveled over a whole bunch of speed humps. We guessed that they calm your speed down with the speed humps. Strange. Not sure what it was doing there, but we saw a “mirror yard” with a slew of mirrored art all over somebody’s front yard. It was quite bizarre out in the middle of a residential neighborhood. We’re sure their neighbors were thrilled.
In Baltimore, Ft. McHenry was our next stop and by this time the cool of the morning had run and hid from the blazing heat of the middle of the day. It was hot!! We watched a wonderful film about the fort and later found out that if it hadn’t been for the brave 60 soldiers holding down the fort, we might have been under British rule now. It was neat to see the flag with 15 stars and 15 stripes. It was really moving to be at the place where Francis Scott Key wrote about the “Star Spangled Banner” and hear the
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Claire at Annapolis background of the story behind it. Leaving there, we traveled downtown to see the USS Constellation (1854 - 1954), it was the last all-sail ship in the US Navy and was in duty in both World Wars. What did she do in World War II? We’re not sure??? We also drove by the 2
nd Washington Monument; we guessed someone felt like he needed another monument. Before leaving Baltimore, we went by Edgar Allen Poe’s House and drove through John Hopkins University.
Frederick, MD was our final destination of the day. Once there, we made a quick stop at our hotel, stopped to go see the Jug Bridge Monument and the statue of the 1
st President. Claire hopped out to make pictures of the statue as Pam and Susan drove around the block. Little did they know, there was a canal and numerous one-way roads. Some 10 mins later they found their way back to Claire standing on the corner uncertain if they had just left her (She was not happy). At supper, we had canal side outdoor seating as we dined on delicious seafood. The canal was beautiful. You probably learned in school that the 1
st President was George
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Mirror tree Washington (1789-1797), but that’s not really true. George was only the 1
st President under the Constitution, but John Hanson was the 1
st President (1781-1782) under the Articles of the Confederation. Not only was he the 1
st President of the United States, but he did a number of important things in his one-year term including declaring the 4
th Thursday in November as Thanksgiving. Now, if you’re a little uncertain about this, you can check it all out here (https://www.constitutionfacts.com/us-articles-of-confederation/john-hanson-story/)
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