Last week I was in Baltimore for a work thing. I was finally sent to agency headquarters to receive training for the job I’d been doing for nearly a year. I love government efficiency. Well, to be fair, thanks to Congress and its never-ending budget crisis, the funding hadn’t been available until now. On the positive side, though, I’d never been to Baltimore, so I took advantage of its proximity both to DC and to my friend Kelly, and stayed an extra couple of days to play tourist. Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Segway tour of Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol Mall, National Aquarium. Whew! Oh, and a yarn store.
Don’t you think this fellow to the left looks a little chilly? Me too. Good thing I’m knitting a scarf. We’ll get to that shortly. 
So, the Smithsonian on Saturday. We visited only the Museum of Natural History, and only the first floor of that, and in the three hours we had allotted for our visit, we still missed a few galleries. I could easily spend all day just on the first floor, and go back another day for the second floor.
The time at the Smithsonian was limited because we had that Segway tour booked for 2:00 PM. Let me tell you, unless you’re prepared to walk all day long, Segway is the ONLY way to see the monuments, the Capitol, the White House, and lots more. It only took a few minutes to learn to ride the thing, and then we were off on our three hour tour. Of course, by the end of that tour, I was flat wiped out. Standing on one of those things is more tiring than you might imagine. But it’s still far better than trying to walk the distance — Kelly and I figured our tour must have covered somewhere between 10 and 15 miles, maybe more, on those things.
On Sunday, we went to the National Aquarium in Baltimore which, despite its name, is not owned by the people like the Smithsonian, and therefore does not have free admission. The Blacktip Reef exhibit was wonderful, and the shark tank, and the puffin feeding, but the star for me was the Jellyfish exhibit. I adore jellies. And this was a decent showing. The aquarium on the whole, though, doesn’t hold a candle to my beloved Monterey Bay Aquarium. I haven’t been to the Georgia Aquarium yet, but it’s on my list. So is the Chattanooga Aquarium. Can you tell I love aquariums?
Somewhere in there, we fit in a visit to a yarn store, where I promptly did my bit for the local economy. Two skeins of lovely sock yarn, and these nifty stitch markers. I suppose they’re actually sort of ordinary, but I like them very much.
So, it was a whirlwind week of training, and an even more whirlwind weekend of sight-seeing. In between all that, though, I made a great deal of progress on my scarf. See? It might even get finished in time for the cooler weather that’s just around the corner.
And that’s my work in progress report. Click the badge below to see what other folks have been up to lately.
Avanta Knits 