September. 17, 2008

Thursday 17, 2008~~~ Today on our way to Maryland, we stopped at two National Parks on the way. The GPS doesn't work real well sometimes on the East coast causing us to miss a turn off the freeway, we needed to go back to the previous exit. Kent saw a Macy's sign in a mall up the road, so he pulled in there to turn around. We couldn't see the underpass that was in there until it was too late. It looked like our rig was too tall and didn't want to replace another air conditioner so we had no choice but to back it our of there. Of course it was very busy with lots of cars coming in to shop. As I have said before, Kent is real good at backing up that 21 ft. truck with a 37 foot camper behind it and Sharon has no problem flagging traffic. We were doing real good until the Mall security came down the street behind a car Sharon was flagging through. He had his lights and some sort of siren going, I think he saw us on his security camera. He asked what we were doing and Sharon told him we were trying to get out of there as we were too tall for the underpass. He asked how tall we were, Sharon said 16' 6 "( It's 12' 6") and he said I don't think so, just follow me. He was so nice, he put his lights on and all traffic the let us pass through and the underpass was 14 feet, so we were OK. He told us where to go to get back on track and we were soon on our way again. If he only knew how many times we have backed that far and turned around before and made it. Once we were back on the road, we stopped at the National Parks" Hampton House" built in 1790 on 25,000 acres. This home had 6 generations of owners over the years and the land was slowly sold off before it was turned over to the Nat. Park Service in 1979 with 60 remaining acres. I think it is one of the largest, most elegantly furnished homes we have seen yet in all of our tours. Next we stopped at Fort McHenry, it is the fort and battle ground where Frances Scott Key wrote the words to the "Star Spangled Banner". I took a picture of the battle that went on when the "Star Spangled Banner was written and a picture about the words of the song and a picture of a carass that looks like a cannon ball and it explodes in air. From here we checked in at the camp ground where we will be staying while we are in Washington DC. We are staying home tomorrow to do laundry and clean house. We are going to be real busy the rest of the days here. (pictures)