Saturday was another day to get up less than early, but we got out in time to go to Best Buy and let me purchase a camera to take the place of the one I left at home by mistake. 🙁 Fortunately this only takes a charge card to fix, so $225 later I had a new Canon A4000 point-and-shoot.
After lunch, we didn’t have any afternoon plans and the idea struck to go to the Baltimore Museum of Industry, which we hadn’t seen in several years, and which turned out to have opened a couple of exhibits we hadn’t yet seen. We also got very lucky and got to the print shop just before the linotype operator took off for lunch, so L and M got to see a lino in operation and get an explanation of how it all worked. I’d been wanting to get there at the right time because I knew from hanging around the newspaper office when I was a kid, and getting to watch the lino and press operators at work, that a linotype in operation is one impressive piece of machinery. After the lino operator got done and went off to lunch, I undertook to show M (carefully) how a hand-fed job press worked, and how the operator had to develop a beat to go with the machine’s rhythm.
We still had a couple of hours before we had to be at the reunion, and since we were down on Locust Point anyway, L had the idea to go to see Fort McHenry, which neither M nor I had seen before. So we wound our way down the point to the fort, where we also found a bunch of re-enactors slowly winding their day down, but not yet done.
A bunch of new recruits learning the manual of arms (shoulder arms, in this case)
Camp followers pushing in a cart of provisions and kitchen utensils
A gunner during down time (note the pipe)
We climbed on the parapets and steps, went down into the shelters and magazines, looked into the guardhouse to see how small cells really were in 1812 (about four by eight feet), and inspected the batteries and the tons of spare barrels and stacked balls lying all around.
M inside a guardhouse cell
A magazine stuffed with gunpowder barrels
A battery of 1880s-vintage Rodman guns pointed at various points of defense in the harbor
M with an 1812 British shell that failed to explode
Eventually the time caught up with us, and we drove back out to Bunrab’s and got ready for the reunion, which was being held in Arnold, miles from Columbia and almost down to Annapolis. Even so, we got to Arnold way too early, and L suggested we drive on into Annapolis and look at the State House dome, which she had heard had been repainted in its original Colonial colors of green and peach. (It wasn’t true; the dome is still white.) Doing that ate up about the right amount of time, and we got to the reunion just when we should. It was a nice party. Seventeen of L’s graduating class of 65 showed up, which is a respectable percentage.
Next time: I start to chase trains. Really.
