While we'd had a fairly heavy downpour overnight, fortunately the rain stopped during the day so we could explore sans umbrellas and wet weather gear. It was soon off to Fell's Point, which we'd driven past when we first arrived in Baltimore, a historic, waterfront neighborhood with cobblestone streets, which was once a bustling shipbuilding port and home to people including Billie Holiday and Frederick Douglass.
Highlights of the Waterfront
There were lots of cute little cafes, shops, bars and restaurants, and it would have been lovely to stroll around, however the narrow streets gave us no options for parking. We had to simply duck out quickly to check out a few places and take some happy snaps, including of The Horse You Came in on Saloon. Its predecessor, Al and Ann's, opened in 1775, and it claimed to be the last place Edgar Allan Poe was seen before his sudden and mysterious death.
Continuing along the waterfront in a westward direction, we saw the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse on Pier 5. Built in 1856, it's the oldest screw-pile lighthouse in Maryland. This style of lighthouse is built on iron piles with a screw-like disk at the bottom, which are then screwed into soft sandy or muddy bottoms of the sea or river. The lighthouses are typically only 1.5 stories tall, and the Seven Foot Knoll Lighthouse is a red, hexagonal wooden building, with a cupola for the light at the top and stairs leading up to it from the pier.
One of the most distinctive buildings by the waterfront, in Inner Harbor, is the Pratt Street Power Plant, a former power plant that's now a big dining and retail complex. It's well preserved and seems to look very much like it would have in its heyday, minus the massive "Hard Rock Cafe" logo and guitar at the top, as well as other retail logos! Across from the Power Plant is the USCG Lightship Chesapeake, a floating museum lightship owned by the National Park Service and on a 25-year loan to Baltimore City. It was sitting in the harbor, but since it had rained heavily the night before, the water had risen so that part of the walkways had flooded!
Northwest Baltimore
There were a few places we wanted to check out in the northwest of the city, starting with Druid Hill Park, which has a number of historical sites, including Pool #2 (the only public swimming pool in Baltimore open to Black Americans during segregation that's now a memorial art exhibit), and the Grove of Remembrance (oak trees planted by the War Mothers of World War I). We didn't really get to find these places easily, but the park itself, which is one of the first large public parks in the country, was really lovely, with the autumn leaves providing a beautiful kaleidoscope of colors on the trees and the ground.
The PaperMoon Diner promotes itself as the city's "most eclectic and vibrant eatery," and based on its exterior, it definitely is a rainbow of color, with a blue shingled wall on one side with yellow trim, a blue and yellow chimney, and a green/yellow/blue roof, accented with red pipes. The diner, which serves classical American breakfasts, burgers, and vegetarian food, is also surrounded by brightly painted mannequins dressed in flashy clothes, with other vivid figurines hiding within the shrubbery. It's happy and quirky!
To continue with the colorful theme, we also drove past the Baltimore Painted Ladies, a row of vibrantly colored houses, set in front of their red brick foundations. Since it was a bit grey when we were there, the bright colors popped even more against the gloomy sky, and the houses reminded us a bit of San Francisco's own Painted Ladies version, that is also a popular tourist attraction.
Our last stop in Baltimore, wrapping up our visit to the artsy part of the city was Graffiti Alley, an L-shaped alley where artists can legally paint and have a creative outlet. A lot of the alley was filled with graffiti tags, but there's a couple of cool images and murals amid the mayhem.
In the evening, we parked at a Welcome Center for the night, which was really busy--we had trucks on either side of us, and had to park behind another RV (the spots were fortunately extra long). The RV ended up leaving before nightfall, but we were woken up around 6am by the trucks next to us, as the drivers were using the parking lot like it was a warehouse, loading up their vehicles noisily around us! It was still pitch black at that time and we were cranky and definitely not impressed to be woken up prematurely. That's definitely one of the challenges with rest stops near trucks--sometimes we're fine, but trucks can be noisy because they can idle for a long time, and the drivers are up at all sorts of hours, which is disruptive!
