Day Eleven: Travel & Baltimore

This morning we were supposed to leave at 10. We woke up at 9:30. Woops! Hadn't really anticipated the late night we ended up having the night before.

We got ready, packed up the car, and said goodbye to Francesca's family.

Francesca's grandmother lives in the upstairs portion of the house with Francesca's aunt. We went to go say goodbye to them.
Francesca posted a poem on this blog a few days ago after we had a conversation with her grandmother.

I don't even know how to put into words what a sweet woman her grandmother is.
She is quite elderly and has some significant dementia. Some days are better than others.
It's obvious she knows she wants to say things, but her brain has trouble putting these thoughts into words, into sentences that make sense.

But she tries and overall she does a good job... it just takes her a bit longer to get her messages across.
She told us all about her travel over to the United States from Poland when she was little.
Before we left today she gave Francesca and I both rosaries to keep with us on our trip.
I hugged and kissed her on the cheek (a very common polish tradition i've learned)  and told her how nice it was to meet her.

She looked me in the eyes and stared for a moment or two before she slowly, quietly stated "I like you. You're sweet"

My heart melted. She said she was glad to have met me too, but that she wished it had been two years earlier...

I'm so happy I got to meet her :)


We headed off to DC, our next location but we did get a late start.
We wanted to stop in Baltimore for dinner with our friend Shoshana....

We basically figured that it would be silly to drive to DC because by the time we got there we'd have nearly no time in the city before we'd have to leave to make it to Baltimore for dinner at 5:30.

Francesca and I made the decision to hold off on DC until tomorrow and just head straight to Baltimore.
As a little girl I always dreamed of living in Baltimore one day. (absolutely no idea why)

We asked Shoshana where a cool place to go would be and she suggested the Inner Harbor. So that's where we redirected the GPS to get us to.

Shoshana works as a therapist at a group home for boys in the city. Since Francesca and I are both Social Work students, she invited us to come tour the group home if we wanted as well.... and we totally took her up on that offer. She told us to meet her at the group home at 5 which gave us about 2 hours to spend in the Harbor.

It was absolutely beautiful.

cute little paddleboats!

We saw a cool looking building in the distance so we decided to check it out.
turned out to be the National Aquarium!

We walked into these doors into what we thought was the lobby.
And we sort just kept walking...right into the aquarium. Right past employees.

Without paying a DIME.

We walked through the entire aquarium without paying.
We didn't do it intentionally at all!

So it was a sweet, secret visit. bahaha.

Again, the place was SWARMED with kids on field trips. Holy crap... so many kids.

Fran in the shark jaw

creepy, right?

sting rays.

creepy picture. thank goodness i didn't actually see one of these suckers.

dolphins

baby pineapple growing!!

We had to leave the aquarium to meet Shoshana.
We later found out that the ticket price of the aquarium is $25 for adults.

wooooopsies!

Shoshana showed us around the group home... well, one of the boys did actually.
He did a great job giving the tour!

We left then and went to dinner at a kosher restaurant because Shoshana is Jewish.
It was really neat :)

We had a really great time.

Afterwards we headed out of Baltimore in search of a cheap hotel on the way to D.C.

We knew the prices would get higher the closer we got to D.C. so we stopped halfway in Laurel, MD.

We grabbed a hotel savings book from a service station and wanted to check out this one place that had a room for $35.

Of course, as one could have expected, we drove around the parking lot and that's all it took for us to leave and move on in search of something better.

The place gave me the creeps and reminded me of a a place i'd go on a CPS investigation.
There were these guys totally cleaning out this car in the parking lot and Fran and I looked at each other and were like...  um. i hope they're not getting rid of evidence of a murder or something.

I snapped a picture, naturally.

didn't quite capture the sketchiness to the degree i had hoped, so you'll have to use your imagination.

We stopped at a Super 8 instead which also was in our coupon book.
It was more expensive than $35 but the coupon did save us $15.

We got a non-smoking room but when we went to check it out, it smelled very strongly of smoke.
So we went back and asked for another room.

This one smells much better.

And now that i've spent the last 3 hours updating this blog, we're going to head to bed!

tomorrow morning we're heading to DC, mainly to see the White House and the Holocaust Museum.

Then it's off to the Blue Ridge Parkway where we'll hopefully find a cool place to hike for a bit.

Can't wait for the pretty scenery!