The harbor and crabs

Even I scratched my head at my pick of Baltimore for this past year’s baseball trip destination. Sometimes the shackles of airline points make for interesting trip planning ideas. I’m a firm believer that there’s plenty of good and fun anywhere if you look for it, and in Baltimore, there were two things that I knew would help round out my trip. First, their harbor (it pains me to write that in the American spelling, I’ll revert to the Canadian and correct spelling for the remainder) would give me some salt water exposure that I’m sorely lacking now that I live in Saskatoon. And secondly, the crab. Oh the glorious, glorious, Maryland crab.

The best single meal I had in Baltimore was also the most simple. Sitting down at a harbour-front patio, I was brought a brown paper bag of steamed Maryland crabs coated in Old Bay, a traditional local beer and a small mallet. I did what came naturally and spent an hour or so working through the crab and picking the shells clean of meat. This was a simply delicious meal.

Baltimore crab

Continue reading

Outsider art in Baltimore

I ended up choosing Baltimore as my baseball trip destination last year mostly by default. For the week I could get away, it was the only place in North America I could get to on my airline points. Not knowing much about the city, once I started planning for the trip there was something that immediately caught my eye. The American Visionary Art Museum, located just around the other side of the harbour from downtown, is a one of a kind art museum in the USA. It is a museum that specializes in “outsider art.” That alone got me interested in visiting this place.

What exactly is outsider art? It’s quirky. It’s outlandish at times. It’s thematically based and curated in a way that I haven’t seen in other more traditional art museums. It’s exactly the kind of art I’m attracted to when traveling. Many times, I’ll use a city’s avant-garde public art as a way of exploring a new place… In Baltimore, they put it all under and around one roof.

Sometimes you just need an example to get a feel for what an art museum is all about. In a gallery featuring an exhibition about art relating to food, this is “Swpeepish Chef” by Christian Twamley – it’s the Muppet’s Swedish Chef made 100% out of Peeps marshmallow candies.

Swpeepish Chef by Christian Twamley

Continue reading

Baltimore beer, ballpark beer

For the four days I was in Baltimore in August, the temperature ranged somewhere from smoking hot to just inside the gates of Hell hot. And humid to boot… like, sweat through three shirts a day humid. Luckily, watching baseball games doesn’t require much exertion, and there’s a ready supply of beer nearby for hydration. Camden Yards, where I spent most of the trip, has a fairly reasonable lineup of craft beers from Maryland and beyond. For game one, the Numero Uno from Flying Dog, a Mexican lager, had a hint of spice and a touch of lime that seemed to help cut through the humidity and made for a very refreshing drink. Another standout from my four days at Camden Yards was the Steady Eddie (named after Orioles legend Eddie Murray) from Union Craft Brewing. This white IPA was delicious, and was an outstanding pairing with the crab waffle fries.

Continue reading

Baseball trip 2017

Every summer I take a four or five day baseball trip. The calculus is normally fairly simple – where can my airline points get me and where is there a decent deal on a nice hotel. As long as there’s baseball and summer nights with a cold beer in my hand, the teams and the city don’t matter too much. While I was planning my trip this year, I had more trouble than normal finding a combination that would work in my schedule. I went through permutations for Milwaukee, St. Louis, Denver, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and a host of other cities until I found that the only place my about to expire United points would get me to was Baltimore. Never really had any desire to visit Baltimore, but Camden Yards and the promise of four days of fresh crab was too good to pass up.

After flying on a red-eye flight through Toronto and sleeping in Pearson for a couple of hours (using points isn’t always glamorous), I arrived in Baltimore slightly jet-lagged, but happy to walk into Camden Yards – a temple of baseball on a scorching hot Saturday night. She’s a beauty ballpark.

Camden Yards

Continue reading