On the road again....

Once again I have found it difficult to keep up. We have been on the move since Cleveland and I have found it very difficult to spend so much time in the saddle and to keep up with the blog. We have finally reached North Carolina where we intend to stay for approximately 2 weeks, so I should be able to bring the blog up to date.

After leaving Cleveland, we drove straight across Ohio and Pennsylvania to Catonsville, Maryland to spend some time with Susan's Aunt Zena. At least 50 miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike is undergoing some kind of construction or repaving, so it was difficult driving at times. The traffic was moving along pretty well, but the road was constricted by those concrete barriers and consequently was very narrowly defined. It was not a situation in which you could enjoy the scenery because it required a great deal of concentration and focus.

Anyway, we arrived in Catonsville about 4:00PM and checked in to the Comfort Inn. Turned out to be adequate with clean, quiet rooms, friendly personnel and free breakfast in the morning. The downside was that our room was on the second floorand there was no elevator. I grabbed all our rolling overnight luggage and headed for the room only to find that I had to leave some of the luggage in the busy stairwell while I carried two peices at a time up the stairs. Admittedly, a minor annoyance, but it is the only situation like that we have encountered.

We headed over to the assisted living facility where Aunt Zena lives and took her out to dinner at a locally recommended restaurant called Kibby's. No one who has ever been to the Baltimore area would be surprised to find out that Kibby's is a seafood restaurant specializing in crab. Nearly everything on the menu was some form of crab, had crab meat in it or crab meat on it. Everything was delicious. We called it an early night and got some much needed sleep.

The next day we picked up Aunt Zena at 11:30am and took her to lunch down at the Inner Harbor of Baltimore. We had lunch at the M&S Grill on the water. I'll bet you can never guess what we had for lunch? That's right.....crab.

After lunch, Aunt Zena surprised us by saying that she thought it would be fun to tour the sailing ship Constellation which is a museum parked at the harbor waterfront. It turns out that the top two decks of the ship (main deck and gun deck) are wheelchair accessible, so we went on board. It was interesting to see how primitively sailors in the days of sail power lived on board ship. You can see the Constellation in the background of the picture above of Aunt Zena, Susan and I at the harbor.

After the tour, Aunt Zena was pretty tired so we took her back to her home so she could rest before we went out to dinner. Dinner was at a restaurant called Matthew 1600 in Catonsville. Very nice. I can recommend this place to anyone who might be in the area. I had chicken St. James which was a sauteed chicken breast covered with mushroooms in a demiglaze and CRAB.

We were only in Catonsville for about 36 hours, but I had enough crab to last me for a while.

We were snails the next morning and didn't get on the road up to Sea Bright, New Jersey until nearly lunch time.