Baltimore Aquarium

Hello!

I know, it's been a while...

Well, you know how these things go. Your intentions are always so good, then life grabs a hold of all your free time and you carry around that misty cloud of weight: "I can't wait until I can sit down and..."

For some people the dot, dot, dot is: watch tele, talk to so-and-so, Facebook (ahem...) or golf. Whatever your dot, dot, dot may be, mine is to post. Each day that passes, I think, "I can't wait to get to my computer and post."

I have family living in Maine - in fact, nearly all of my
family lives in Maine - save a cousin or two.

This Blog has become the portal to our
lives here in Harrisburg, PA.

Sam and I took the kids to Inner Harbor this past weekend (Maryland). We had a fantastic time on our day trip there and I took a million pictures. I promise not to bore you with all of them, but I have included a few below for your viewing pleasure. I will also share with you an interesting conversation with a water taxi driver as we passed from Inner Harbor over to Fell's Point. He may as well have been from my great state:

After some good old fashioned elbow throwing and bantering sarcasm, he looked me in the eye and said,

"What's in H'rrisburg, anyway? 'Sa shame you gotta come all the way down here to enjoy a day out."

It struck me for a minute. I wasn't sure what to say. Then it dawned on me,

"You, of course. I came all the way down here to see you, and that's the welcome I get?"

He shot me a gnarly, toothless grin and replied simply,

"Good'un. I don' blame yah."

The pictures below are of our day trip to Baltimore... scroll down and I'll show you all we saw.

So, we started with the

National Baltimore Aquarium.

Sam and I had gone to visit this place when we were dating - this is the first time the kids have seen it. Drew's obsession with sharks made it a particularly eye-opening experience for him.

As most of you now know, I have been developing my love of photography into something of a full-blown hobby. Being home with the kids for the summer, I decided I was going to document this summer in a whole new way, starting primarily with this blog. What it has also given me, however, is the inspiration I needed to start exploring the potentials of my camera a bit more aggressively. The pictures of this day in Baltimore gave me the perfect opportunity to give my new knowledge a test run.

This starfish was stuck to the glass of an exhibit, facing a room full of
gawking children and nervous parents.
He was, essentially, staring at his audience for a change.

We visited the tropical tanks and then, of course, the deep sea tanks to visit the sharks.

At the very top of the aquarium, encased in a glass pyramid, is a make shift rainforest. It inhabits many creatures you would typically see in areas no where near Harrisburg. This colorful fellow was quite happy to act as singing host to all the onlookers and giddy kiddies.

In a new exhibit, Jellies Invasion, I found a new facination for myself... regardless of the fact this trip was for the kids. The way these things float, ghostlike, through the water was live salve for the nerves. In this particular exhibit, they played new age, soothing music and the lighting for these tanks was different from all the others. It was a beautiful thing to witness and a wonderous thing to photograph.

This is the inside of a Jellyfish, taken with a macro.

These had the very technical name of "Upside Down Jellies".

fter the aquarium, we hopped on the water taxi and headed for our favorite place: Fells Point.

Apparently this place is a big deal - they even mass produce a bumper sticker for the patrons. It was a great adventure to enter into an ancient building baring the name "Bertha's", to explore its maze of an interior and find a corner table with a most jubulient waitress and eat mussels until our hearts' content.

Fresh mussels... kind of like home.

Afterwards, we got ice cream.

Liv, of course, had to have the most obnoxious ice cream they had:

It was BRIGHT blue.

From Fells Point, we caught another water taxi and headed onward to Fort McHenry, the Revolutionary War location of the origination of the Star Spangled Banner.

This is where it was written.

A water taxi then took us from Fort McHenry, back to Fells Point where we enjoyed Icees with brilliantly colored sugar syrup squeezed over them... it was about 100 degrees in the sun, so we felt obligated to enjoy them as we waited for our connection back to the Inner Harbor.

When we arrived, we were lured by the thought of air conditioning and reentered the aqarium for the Dolphin Show. Our seats were way up in the nose bleed section, however, the show was really great and these animals clearly love what they are doing for all their adoring fans.

Drew and Liv are an absolute wonder - we are so blessed to have this time with them and to experience days like these with them.  Days like this are so nice to record and to share it with all of you makes it better even still.

Our love to you all,

The Boore Family