Adventures in Baltimore

My trip to Maryland was fairly uneventful. The first night the rain was unrelenting and I was very pleased with myself for remembering an umbrella. However, that was the only rainy day and the rest of the week was beautiful and sunny and the umbrella and raincoat took a lot of precious baggage space. The training went very well and everyone was just as nice in person as they have been on the phone. One evening the took me out for drinks and fresh crab. I was so excited to learn how to shell my own crab and to clobber the suckers with the hammer. However, I did not get half-way through my first crab before one of the ladies said "Give me that thing, you are demolishing it" and she subsequently removed all the meat in about 5 seconds. From then on I got all the crab meat I could eat from her and a couple other native Marylanders at the table. The crab meat itself was not a disappointment; it truly was better than any crab I have had before. YUM YUM.
On Saturday, I had some time to kill before my plane left at 5 that afternoon so I tooled around Baltimore proper for a while. Finding Babe Ruth's birthplace and the nearby sports museum was no problem and I was really impressed with the quaint narrow streets and the turn of the century architecture in that area. Once, I had gone through the Babe Ruth House and the Sports Museum (YAWN), I was ready for a little adventure. I was determined to find Edgar Allan Poe's House Museum. I was told it was on a less than desirable part of town but it looked so close to the down town area that I was sure it couldn't be that bad. I was so proud of myself for being able to maneuver the narrow, one way, down town streets and find the street that the museum was on but once I got to the stree I could not find the house at all. All I could find was a couple official looking signs that said "E.A. House this way" with an arrow pointing to an empty lot with a couple dillapidated buildings. The museum was probably amongst that mess of derelict homes but I wasn't sure where I could park and the area didn't really seem friendly. So I just drove on. What a wimp huh? If anyone reading this as ever actually been to the museum leave a comment because I spoke to one of my friends who had the same experience trying to find the place. Poor Poe he died peeniless and his legacy isn't doing too much better in that rough part of Baltimore.