For Spring Break, we decided to trade in some of points we had accumulated to take a family vacation, and after McKenna vetoed anything in the mountains that might involve hiking, we settled on a trip to New York City. Laura’s aunt and uncle would watch our dog, Finley, in Fredericksburg, so we opted to go from there to Baltimore for the first night and visit the National Aquarium, leaving for New York the next day.

We had accidentally found out that there were cool places to stay in Baltimore last May, when Laura had announced that she wanted to go to Atlantic City during a trip to New Jersey and “people watch,” an announcement that mystified all the people who both knew Laura and had visited Atlantic City. We reserved a hotel in Atlantic City in spite of the fact that Laura does not like casinos, gambling, or wearing poorly-fitting thongs on the Boardwalk, which is pretty much the trifecta of Atlantic City offerings.

The combination of the Boardwalk experience and the mere sight of the lobby of the Atlantic City Days Inn destroyed Laura’s vision of Atlantic City as a reproduction of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.

• (Inside the hotel lobby to park) Laura: This place isn’t what I was expecting.
• (On the Boardwalk) Laura: This place definitely isn’t what I was expecting.
• (In a casino, which is what everyone expects out of Atlantic City) Laura: This place REALLY isn’t what I was expecting.
• (On the Boardwalk, passing the tenth poorly-fitting thong) Laura: This place is much worse than I was expecting.

This experience left Laura with one thought: we had to get the hell out of Atlantic City. Cancelling the hotel reservation, we evacuated the city as fast as our 2007 Honda-CRV would take us, and, by chance, found a discounted hotel near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

The Inner Harbor is walkable, with great views of the harbors as well as lots of local restaurants and bars with outdoor seating. Our Baltimore experience was so positive that we decided to plan a return trip some time. We were able to work it in on our way to New York during this April trip, but we found Baltimore in April to be just a bit chillier than during our late May visit.

Fortunately, there are lots of things to do indoors, shielded from the cold harbor wind.

We had purchased tickets ahead of time to get into the National Aquarium, and while those reservations were for 3:30, the cold caused us to take a chance that they would let us in closer to 2pm. As it turned out, our tickets could have been for almost any time, and possibly for any day of the year, and we would have been admitted.

We went up to the Australian exhibit first, which is worth seeing both for the layout and the fish, turtles, and birds.

In the section of the aquarium featuring Atlantic sealife, there is a section where skates and horseshoe crabs can be touched, as long as their eyes and tails are not touched.

This part of the aquarium was super popular, and we discovered the downside to the aquarium’s liberal entry policy.

We adopted a strategy of stalling at certain tanks to let the larger groups pass, making the crowds more manageable.

Lastly, we went to the theater for a 4D presentation; 4D is where the seats puff air, spray water, of poke the viewer in sync with a movie. You have not lived life to the fullest until you have been in such a theater with Laura, whose loud reactions to the water, breezes, and pokes may have constituted a 5th dimension of movie experience. We were supposed to be seeing a movie on the octopus, but, in a plot twist, the movie we were shown instead was about sharks. Assuming that my old man brain had signed us up for the wrong movie, I was perfectly content to learn about this awesome shark that can camouflage itself like a special forces assassin to blend in with the sea floor, but the theater operator changed to the correct movie about ten minutes in. Then we learned about the octopus, and how the octopus likes to team up with other subaquatic assholes, like the grouper and eels, to entrap unsuspecting innocent fish and crabs. Not cool, octopus.

Next up – New York City!