Baltimore to North Carolina - June 14-16, 2009

(Fifi! the water skiing poodle. Postcard from Baltimore)

We woke the next morning to the sounds of Sean's two lady finches, Sadie and Edith, having quite the squabble. One of them had laid some eggs and they were being pretty territorial. Sending them to time out, Ben and I tried to figure out the best way to finish our time in Baltimore before our departure that afternoon. We grabbed some breakfast with Sean, then said goodbye as he headed off for a photo shoot, and me and Ben headed for our last stop in Baltimore. One of my favorite places, the Visionary Art Museum. If you take the water taxi from the Inner Harbor, you can see the sign across the water from the boat. It's a vertical sign along the corner of the brick building, but what makes it easy to spot is the neon and metal eye at the top. What makes the Visionary so awesome is that the work in the museum is all done by self-taught artists. A couple sections of the gallery are filled with work completed by people who have been institutionalized, making it that much more intriguing.

Fortunately, there was a beautiful wedding happening in the Visionary garden. Unfortunately, that meant that we couldn't explore the other building housing even more handcrafted works.

Ah well, just another reason to bring Benjamin back.

Then we were back on the road. Our next destination was Greensboro, North Carolina to stay with my Aunt and Uncle. It should have been about a 6 hour drive, but took us actually close to 8 hours. Again, we hit some pretty bad rain that followed us a good way down. We also took Route 29 pretty much all the way down, which, while very scenic, took forever, and wasn't too fun to navigate through the dark. We got into Greensboro around 11:30pm, and after some short visiting with the fam crashed out. It was the first night we could actually sleep in and not have to think about all our road trip plans.

We slept in some, and woke up in time for my Aunt coming home from work - she took half the day off, and we went to go see the botanical gardens about 10 minutes away. The Bog Gardens were lovely and as isolated as they could be considering the dense suburbia we were in.

We hopped over to the plaza next door for some P.F. Chang's which my Aunt was craving, and kept it pretty mellow for the rest of the day.

The next day we said so-long, and headed for Charlotte, NC to visit one of Ben's friends, Chad, and his wife and little baby girl, Cassidy. It started raining a bit there too (we seemed to have brought it with us everywhere), but no worries, because it passed over us while feasting at a great little place, Lupie's Cafe.

(a sassy veggie poster at Lupie's)

The chili's great, the burgers are huge, daily specials fantastic, and $1 PBR's to wet your whistle, our you could splurge, with their most expensive brew not hitting over $3. For dessert, make sure to have their Kuchen (prounced coo-gan). A total gift from Germany, it's a great, warm, custard-like treat with a crispy crust.

That would've been it for Charlotte right there except that when we were leaving, we passed by this great fella in a hershey ice cream cone sandwich-board, working hard to bring in some clientele for the shop next door. Sorry guy, filled up on the Kuchen.

Next stop: New Orleans, Louisianna.