Our last day in Baltimore was spent visiting the Aquarium and the Inner Harbor. We tried to go to the Aquarium on Saturday, but the crowd proved too much. Luckily, Sunday was much better because it was rainy and grey so it was practically deserted. The Baltimore Aquarium is one of KT's favorites and he'd been many times as a kid, and now I totally understand why! There's a large shark and sting ray pool in the center that the rest of the exhibits encircle it so you can see it from nearly any point inside. We had a lot of fun searching the exhibits for the hard to find animals - like the poison dart frogs that are about the size of a quarter. They also had a neat rain forest exhibit that was like stepping into Malaysia for a second. There were monkeys, spiders, and birds all around practically roaming free in the rain forest room. It even rained on us!
After the Aquarium we went on a quest for me to have my first crab cake. I just recently started eating sea food and discovered that crab is probably my favorite. So how perfect that we were in Crab Central Maryland! After searching around on yelp to no avail, we just went with Phillip's Seafood right on the Inner Harbor. There was a guy walking around in a crab costume for them and since we got our picture with him we got a free appetizer! We got a crab cake appetizer and I got the crab macaroni and cheese while KT got the shrimp scampi. Delicious all around and we had a great view of the water. I can see this place being incredibly busy during peak hours and sunny days.
After the harbor we had to head up north to The Big Apple. We relied on my iPhone to get us there and that was probably a costly mistake. The iPhone Google Maps app does not give you an option to avoid toll roads, or tell you when a toll is coming up. So, we start the drive and encounter our first toll - $5! Then we continue driving and there was another one, making it $9 just to get through Delaware. We wise up and start looking online for cheaper routes, but it's too late. We're pretty much stuck on the highway the rest of the way and by the end of the trip we had spent $22 just to drive from Baltimore to NYC. We're definitely going to try to find a different route for our drive to Philadelphia!
Once we got in to NYC it was a breeze, KT's parents found a place for us to park for our duration here. We're staying at their condo in Brooklyn which has a great view of the skyline, if only it weren't so cloudy and grey. We're spending today out in the downtown area with no set plan except to check out the new Pop Tart World. We'll be sure to give a full report on that attraction!
