East Coast Road Trip, Friday: Baltimore
Thankfully, after the debacle of a morning I had getting us onto the bus to New York, the train we were catching to Baltimore was due in at a relatively sedate 11:35. Zora was up and dressed and ready a little before 10am, so I suggested that we probably had sufficient time to head to the diner connected to the lobby of the hotel and feed her a real breakfast. So we left the packed luggage in the rooms and had a quick mostly-omelet-fueled breakfast, and I was suitably impressed at the fact that Zora could put away food as quickly as I did when the situation called for it. Then, after a false start when I left Zora's coat in the closet in the room while she paid the tab, off we went to Penn Station to catch a train.
The Amtrak section of Penn Station wasn't laid out nearly as intuitively as I expected. But, eventually, I figured out the layout, and got us into the waiting area for just long enough for me to determine that our train was boarding now. The number of people getting onto that southbound train was pretty massive, but not so massive that the cars were all filled up... just meant that Zora didn't get a whole section to herself the way she did on the bus, and had to deign to sit beside me. With the free outlets and wi-fi, we both spent the first portion of the train ride catching up on the internets, with Zora additionally adding music to the experience. Then, since she was again on a vehicle with an engine, she took a nap.
I did find the train ride more pleasant than I was afraid it might be. Amtrak is a smooth ride generally, and the northeast corridor is probably the best place to hop on a train in the country. It fills that niche between bus travel and airplane travel in the cost-versus-time equation, and does it well. How much that'd hold true in other parts of the country, I'm not sure I want to know.
We exited the train at BWI, and, despite earlier navigational problems in the vacation, Zora went with my desire to walk the mile from the amtrak station at BWI to the rental car building, rather than having to take two different circulating buses to get there. (One of my favorite things about BWI is that it was built to be a far more walkable airport than any other I've been to. There are paths to cross the highway and get over to nearby hotels, paths to get to the rental car station, and just some nice general nature trails.
The gentleman at Thrifty told me that I couldn't put the car on a credit card other than the person with the license. This was annoying, as I had been doing a very good job of deflecting attempts by Zora to pay for anything. But, it hardly seemed reasonable to take my business down the hall at this stage, so I asked Zora if she had a card she could put it on, and after some pondering (which made me feel guiltier for asking), she picked one. The whole process felt shadier than any car rental I'd ever been a part of before, and I'm not sure how much of that was the guy's behavior, or his accent, or the policies being different, or what.
Then, he sent us to the parking garage where, apparently, all of the rental agencies kept their cars. (This was my first time renting at an airport, so maybe they just work differently.) I had reserved a full-sized car, but, as Zora began a detailed examination of cars, involving the exterior, sitting in the driver's seat, and so on, she happened to notice an electric blue car sitting a few parking spots away. It was a Dodge Avenger, which made her drive-no-American-cars sensibilities hurt, but, eventually, it won the battle against the clunkier Ford and Mitsubishi it was competing with. Then it would just be a matter of whether they stopped us when we checked it out because it wasn't a full-sized car. But the person at the gate just scanned the car's sticker, scanned our paperwork, and sent us on our way. Car selection success!
My navigation from BWI to the Aquarium went fairly painlessly. Finding the parking garage took an extra loop, so we just settled on parking by a hot black BMW sports car in a parking lot, instead.
I hadn't been to the Baltimore Aquarium in close to 20 years. I had last been in Baltimore, I suspect, for the one JohnCon I went to, around 2001, where I first spent any time with the Loonies (though I'd seen them at the Technicon before), and had an awesome time in their PopTart Cafe. The harbor felt familiar, despite all that, though nothing inside the Aquarium did.
Zora came alive once we were inside, and I had my first real exposure to the Bio Geek side of her. It was enthralling. The variety of fish species she could name (often complete with Latin names), and what she could say about their feeding habits, their mating habits, their habitats... she was way more knowledgeable than any random Aquarium volunteer I'd ever met, and she seemed even more passionate about the topic.