BALTIMORE, Maryland, July 8, 2005 — I'm determined to stay in bed a little and get back the early rising hours and the time zone change. I succeed, too. It is late when we stumble out. We got up after eight and took our time getting coffee and showers and getting ready to tour around. We get our car brought around and get the umbrellas. That will finish off the rain for a while.

We walked around looking for a suitable breakfast. Finally settled on a place called Never on Sunday. I got way too much breakfast and ate it all. FFP got us the Baltimore Sun and we read about the local squabbles and then the headlines from the world. Like London.

We decide to go see the Walkers Museum. We go into museum and immediately take in the special French drawing show. It's pretty neat and several of the drawings are studies for paintings or sculptures in the museum. We get the audio tour thing and go to the fourth floor and look at some great paintings and sculptures. Finally we decide that, you know, we'd better eat a bunch of lunch before it gets too late and ruins our dinner. Eating out is what we live for. That's well known.

We go to an Italian joint for lunch. A place on Charles called Sotte Soca, I think. We have an interesting blueberry risotto with stuffed veal.

We tried earlier to go the Contemporary Musueum. It wasn't open. We decide to call them and they opened at noon. We head on over. A tiny space with an interesting collection of sort of grafitti-oriented works. It was fun.

We head back to the hotel, dump the rain jackets and umbrellas and go down to the waterfront. It's a tourist-oriented area awash in Red Sox fans in town for the clash with the Orioles. We go into Barnes and Noble for some postcards for my great nephews. Then we head over to Little Italy. Little apartments interspersed with many Italian restaurants. Have to make time to eat in one of them next time we are in Baltimore.

We walk back to the hotel and rest before going to dinner. We made this reservation a few weeks ago at a place called Saffron in the Mount Vernon area. You can make Mount Vernon a theme for trips all over the U.S. It's amazing. Mount Vernon area of Baltimore, Mount Vernon in Texas, Virginia, Illinois, New York and Maine. But I digress.

We are expecting some good French-influence Asian Fusion food. Our first clue that we will be a little disappointed is the fact that the other patrons aren't very dressed up. Not at all...shorts, sandals, untucked polos on some of them. We order some water and wine and I start with foie gras. The menu on the WEB and outside said eighteen dollars. I swear the menu I got said the same but later I'll look at a menu on the way out and it's twenty-five! (And that's what I was charged. Call Greenspan! Inflation is rampant.) The preparation with lintels sounds suspicious but I trust it will work. The small bit of foie gras is nicely seared but it is swimming, nay drowning, in lintel soup. Not great and very, very expensive as it turns out. My next course, a cucumber crab soup, works well. It doesn't rock my world but it's refeshing and nice with a scent of some interesting spice that works. Next I have duck breast. It is rubbery. We even mention it to the waiter. It is really, really poorly prepared. He doesn't adjust the bill. Of course, he doesn't fill our wine glasses either. So, not real special, this meal. We really enjoyed our random walk-in dinner last night and lunch today. We are on vacation, we are trying things out. Tomorrow we are taking off for New York. So we go to back to the hotel and relax.