We also added lots more pics to our picasa web album for this trip.
Sunday and Monday were basically veg-out and errand days to get us through the Memorial Day weekend. Sunday we drove north into the west side of Pittsburgh to a Costco for a few supplies. Our GPS took us through some of what appeared to be the rougher side neighbourhoods. Not much to speak of in that area. We then drove over to the north side to a mall which featured Nordstrom as one of their anchor tenants. Same thing during the drive over there. While in Nordstrom Kris asked a cosmetics person where more upscale/trendy areas of the city might be. He suggested Shadyside a bit north east of downtown. So we headed over there and he was right. The "main" street in the Shadyside district featured numerous boutique shops, a few restaurants and pubs and was very pleasant to wander around, however by this time is was late Sunday afternoon and pretty well everything was closed up for the day. On the way back to the RV park we picked up some nice pork chops to be grilled for dinner. Very nice evening for sitting out.
Monday we stayed a bit closer to home. Spent some time in the pool. Since most of the long weekenders checked out by late morning we basically had the pool to ourselves and one other family who appeared to be getting one last dip in for the kids before heading out. Later we took a drive around the town of Washington and saw lots of beautiful old houses, most of which looked a tad like the proverbial "money pits". For dinner tonight we bought some prime rib steaks for grilling and they were delicious for a fraction of the cost of the same thing at a restaurant. Another nice evening out for sitting out.
Tuesday we packed up for the long drive, of about 2 hours, to Bedford, Pennsylvania. We decided to stop there for the day as it is just a bit east of the Flight 23 National Memorial, a very moving place honoring the memory of the passengers of Flight 23 on September 11, 2001 who overpowered the terrorists hi-jacking the plane thereby thwarting the terrorist plan to crash the plane into the US Capitol building....
Leaving the memorial we continued onto to the Friendship Village Campground just outside of Bedford. While checking in we picked up some literature on local places one of which really perked Kris' interest. So we set up the wee trailer and headed into the historic downtown area of Bedford to the National Museum of the American Coverlet. Now, I, Brian, have to say... we walked through the entrance door and it was like Kris had walked into seventh heaven. This place was pretty neat...
... The Museum Director/Curator gave us a personal tour that lasted close to 2 hours and went well past their closing time, but she, Melinda, was a fountain of knowledge and just loved to share that knowledge. What a fabulous place - a must visit for anyone who weaves.
By the time we left the museum it was evening and time to get some dinner but too late to set to grilling something for ourselves. So we visited the historic 1760s Jean Bonnet tavern on the edge of town...
We chose the pub rather than the dining room and had an excellent dinner of bacon cheeseburger with sweet potato fries for Brian and crab cakes with salad for Kris. We sat at the bar and watched the Nationals vs Cubs baseball game and had a great chat with the bartender who is a life long Bedford resident. She told us of the numerous industries that had long supported the town but had since moved out.
Wednesday was another one of those long 2 hour drive days but this time it did have some added stress. Most of the way was on I-70 during a very heavy downpour. A lot of big rig trucks travel this interstate and those things throw up a lot of road water. At times visibility was very low and to add to the issue, many other car drivers do not put on their headlights. It rained so hard we considered just continuing on to Washington DC rather than stopping in Williamsport, Maryland our planned stop for the night. However, the rain subsided and actually quit as we approached Williamsport so we headed for the Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park between Williamsport and Hagerstown. Normally we would never stay in this type of park as they are usually overrun by children; great for the kids; not so much for people looking for a restful stop. However, it was the best looking park around (as per research on the Good Sam web site) so we decided to take a chance on a mid-week stopover. We were right. The place was mostly empty but while checking in we noticed a large stack of what looked like reservations and asked the desk person about them. "Yes, the 2 inch thick pile of papers is all reservations for the upcoming weekend - we are booked solid". She went on to say that last weekend, being a holiday, they were sold out months in advance and it was chaotic. But... they do seem to enjoy it, so good on them.
Anyway, we no sooner got the wee trailer set up than the skies opened up and it began to pour again. Rats... we were hoping to go visit the Antietam Civil War Battlefield National Park but this was not looking good. So we headed into downtown Hagerstown to see if we could find some lunch and maybe the rain would let up later in the afternoon. We told our trusty GPS to take us to "city hall" as that should take us pretty well into the center of the old downtown area and it did. We drove the grid of downtown streets for about a half hour while the rain continued to pour very heavily. Finally the rain started to abate, we found parking spot and went into The Bulls & Bears pub, where we each had a cup of Maryland Crab soup; a club sandwich (Brian) and a steak salad (Kris) for lunch. While there we found that a 3 day Blue Grass festival in conjunction with a downtown pop-up stall festival starts tomorrow. Sounds like a lot of fun but we have reservations in Washington DC for the next few days. Oh well, win some, lose some :-(
By the time we finished lunch the rain had totally stopped (as our waitress had predicted) so we headed off to the Antietam Civil War Battlefield National Park...
Another very good Civil War park with a great visitor center. We watched a film about the army contingents involved, the strategies and that this place is the site of the "bloodiest one day battle in American History where 23,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing after 12 hours of savage combat". Excellent small museum and souvenir store. It started to rain lightly again so we decided to pass on the battlefield tour. Later we went on a bit of a snark hunt looking for a Starbucks but our GPS kept taking us places where "arriving at Starbucks on the left" was just a figment of it's imagination. When we get to a RV park with decent WIFI we'll have to try to do an update on the GPS.
Thursday was a fairly easy drive into the Cherry Hill RV Park in College Park, a northern suburb of Washington DC. We stayed here a few years ago found it to be an excellent RV park in a great location for visiting Washington. After getting set up we took a drive around College Park to find a Bank of America ATM then stopped in at Looney's Pub on Baltimore Ave. Being on the edge of the University of Maryland this place is packed with students but we found a couple of seats at the bar. Lots of TVs so we were able to watch portions of a couple of MLB games as well as one of the Women's College World Series (WCWS) softball games. Nice wine with a nice happy hour price of $3 a glass.
Friday morning we picked up a "Senior's" metro Smartcard (since one of us now qualifies) as it gives a 50% discount on metro rides. We then took the bus from the RV Park to the Cherry Hill metro station and caught the Green line into central Washington. We got off at the Smithsonian station and transferred to a Orange line train that took us to Foggy Bottom metro station and The George Washington University, the new home of the National Textile Museum. Getting off at the GWU metro station we asked a young man if he knew of a Starbucks near by. We immediately picked up that he is not an American because he pointed up the street and said "about 50 metres that way". He was right so we stopped in for a coffee and a bit of reading before heading off to the museum. Easy to find on the corner of 23rd NW and G street. We visited the former Textile museum a few years ago but this place is much larger with better display galleries for their collections. On this day there was a special exhibit entitled "Unraveling Identity: Our Textiles, Our Stories"....
For lunch we walked across the street to Tonic, a place that bills itself as "upscale American comfort foods" and had a couple of lunch special salads. Pretty darn good.
The area around the Textile Museum is not all that exciting. Mostly university buildings and the such. So we opted to see if we had enough energy to visit another museum. We usually try to limit ourselves to two museums a day at most otherwise we tend to get museum-ed out, especially if there are large crowds. We headed back to the Smithsonian specifically to see the Julia Child's Kitchen exhibit. When we were here a few years ago this exhibit was "in storage" so finally we get to see it...
.... and it is very cool. The kitchen is from her home in Cambridge, Mass and is the location that she shot many of her cooking shows. She was the start of the modern day "Food Channel". Included in the exhibit are a series of excerpts from her cooking shows. Great!
Since, as we sort of expected, the museum was very crowded (there must have been dozens of teenage and younger school groups there on this day) so after seeing what we had come to see we made an exit, headed back to the metro and the RV park.
Since it was a Friday evening we decided to head back down to the University of Maryland area and Looney's Pub again. This time it was truly packed to the gills and we had to put our name on the waiting list for a table. Having our name on the list we headed into the crowd... lo and behold two seats together appeared at the bar.... and right in front of a MLB baseball game and a WCWS game to boot. Man was this place noisy. There was stage with a guitarist playing and singing "really loud". Turns out when our turn for a table came up it was right in front of one of his speakers.... needless to say we stayed at the bar, settled in to enjoy both ball games, a couple glasses of wine and some Looney's Crab Skins (Potato skins topped with crab imperial and cheddar cheese; served with sour cream).... delicious :-)
Saturday our museum of choice was the National Museum of the American Indian (since we missed this one on our last trip here). You really can't say enough about this museum. Fabulous!!! It focuses not so much on artifacts, but more on the different cultures and the evolution of those cultures from the arrival of the Europeans to modern day, with numerous displays on treaties, both kept and broken (seems most were broken).
Since the National Museum of the American Indian is just a few blocks from the Canadian Embassy we stopped at the embassy to admire Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii, the Black Canoe, a must see for anyone, especially Canadians, visiting Washington, DC....
Leaving the American Indian Museum, we decided we had one more museum stop in us, so we headed for the National Gallery of Art to check out their Vermeer collection- just to make sure they are being taken care of - and they are - here's a couple of them (the other two are on our picasa album for this trip)...
For the afternoon we jumped on the metro and went up to the Dupont Circle area where there are numerous boutique shops and generally nice street strolling. We lunched at Kramerbooks & Afterwards Cafe & Grill where we had a Buffalo burger, for Brian of course, and a Crab cake and avocado salad for Kris, followed by a shared Goober Pie which has to be one of the most evil, but delicious, things going!
After wandering the area for a bit and some trying on of shoes, it was time to head back to the RV park. The thing about the bus from the park to the metro and back is that on Saturdays it only runs once an hour. Last time here we just missed a bus back from the metro and had to stand and wait a full hour, in blistering heat, for the next one. This time we lucked out and only had to wait about 10 minutes. If we had of been thinking, when we left in the morning, we would have driven our car and parked at the metro... maybe next time.
To finish off the week here, we headed up the road to the nearby Hard Times Cafe for some wine, chicken wings and to watch a bit more baseball and softball.
Oh, a little story from the RV park. We are three spots removed from a couple from New Orleans. They have a similar wee trailer, a Scamp, about the same size as ours. I, Brian, met the guy on Thursday and we exchanged stories about our trailers and our travels. I explained that ours was an Outback (the key point in this story)... On Saturday we ran into them again and he said that he had to tell us a funny thing that happened... after I had chatted with him, on Thursday, he related the details to his wife. On Friday, his wife was talking to a couple, from Australia no less, and thought she was talking to us... she went on to ask them "how do you like the Outback?" to which they replied that they didn't mind it but preferred the coast a lot more. This answer went right over her head and she proceeded to ask "do you find there is enough room in it?" and "does it have air conditioning?" at which point both she and Australians realized that the conversation had gone totally off the rails.... Funny!
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