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Baltimore → Chantilly 88.3 mi (142.1 km) |
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Hello again, everyone!
I have just seen off the veterans on their Honor Flight home, but I’m still here on the ground until tomorrow when I plan to visit Manassas National Battlefield Park! There’s lots to see between here and DC, so let’s get to exploring!
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If you’ve ever wondered how the Baltimore Ravens got their name, it’s because Edgar Allan Poe called this city home for three years. In fact, his house isn’t far from Fort McHenry, so it was my first stop on the road south!
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Even though Mr. Poe was born in Boston and spent most of his career working in Richmond, Baltimore was where he fell in love with short stories. He wrote nine of them in this house, including King Pest the First, Berenice, and MS. Found in a Bottle!
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Most of the furniture has been removed from this super cramped three-story house, but Mr. Poe’s bedroom and traveling writing desk are still upstairs! It’s amazing to imagine his ghost still pacing the room, concocting his next story!
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I didn’t have much time to stay here, since it was already after 3:00, and my next stop closed at 5:00! I hustled south to Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, the nation’s only national park based around aquaculture!
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Since it was late summer, bordering fall, I was too late for lily blooms but right on time to get my passport stamp! These gardens originally belonged to Civil War veteran, Walter Shaw, who transplanted his first lilies here from Maine in the 1880s. Since colonization, wetlands had been largely reviled and destroyed, but Mr. Shaw loved his lilies so much that he snapped up this parcel of wetland on the edge of the Anacostia River!
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Thanks to Mr. Shaw’s hard work, and that of his daughter and successor, Helen, this area not only preserves some of the Capital Area’s last original wetlands, but also an amazing assortment of waterlilies, lotus, and nuphar, which may be the ancestor of both! I was really excited because the ranger said there had been giant Amazonian lilies here, but a beaver had eaten them all! It wasn’t me! I promise!
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I had a really nice stroll along the narrow walkways stretching between the ponds, and even struck up a conversation with an older photographer enjoying the late summer warmth, but I still had one more park to visit before dark, and it required a little backtracking!
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Greenbelt Park is nestled right in the heart of Rex Tugwell’s dream garden city of Greenbelt, which he planned during FDR’s administration. Today, it’s a laid back park with lots of camping and hiking options within a few miles of Washington, DC! It’s got over nine miles of trails, 174 camping spots, and…
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It’s tick season in Maryland, and if I was going to take a walk in the woods, I was going to have to watch my legs! Maryland is one of those hotbeds of tick borne diseases: anaplasmosis, babesiosis, Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever… The list keeps going! I took a deep breath and set off to stroll. (Fun fact: ticks are attracted to carbon dioxide, so the less you breathe, the less they care about you!)
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Aside from tickly perils, this was a really nice place to walk. After a long, dry California summer, it was so refreshing being surrounded by Maryland’s amazing green! The forest is so dense and quiet, and the mushrooms were so cool!
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In this coastal climate, mushrooms are abundant and diverse! Lots of them are even edible! There’s no collecting allowed in this park, but that shouldn’t stop you from joining a local mycological society if you’re interested! Meanwhile, I had lots of fun admiring the shapes and sizes!
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But the sun was setting, and it’s a bad idea to be caught in dark woods that are full of ticks! So I went to visit some Maryland Historical Landmarks on my way back to Washington! Maryland landmarks are very conspicuous, since they are on top of posts! Some such places along the way were the site where Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, grand champion of labor, died; Rhodes’ Tavern, where George Washington dined on his way back to Mount Vernon for the last time; and the College Park Airport, the oldest continually operating airport in the world!
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As darkness fell, I grabbed a bite at a local African market, then headed back into the capital for a quick stroll by night. I started by visiting the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, inaugurated on August 28, 2011 in honor of the famed civil rights leader! This majestic sculpture was actually carved by Chinese master, Lei Yixin, from a special kind of granite only found in China! Dr. King emerges from the Stone of Hope, which has split from the Mountain of Despair, and through that split, you can see the Jefferson Memorial to commemorate the truth that all men are created equal!
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From there, I took a stroll along the windy Mall to the two most recent war memorials, for Korea and Vietnam. The Korean War Memorial features the ghostly apparitions of soldiers marching into the chilly unknown. I thought this was appropriate, because the Korean War is often called the forgotten war because it’s overshadowed on one side by World War II and on the other by Vietnam.
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And in truth, the Vietnam War Memorial often does get more attention, because it commemorates, by name, all 58,195 American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War, a deeply personal and humbling display in that, like the Korean War Memorial, the wall here is polished so finely that it reflects anyone who looks upon it. You can literally see yourself among the names and faces of wars past!
So in a state of quiet, I said “So long!” to the National Mall, for now, and headed south. I have one more adventure waiting for me before I return to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon!
Down to ol’ Virginny!
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Total Ground Covered: 178.2 mi (286.8 km) |
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