We’d grown better able to avoid the ghettos by this second visit to Baltimore, and we saw a fair amount of the city, although our time was a little limited. This time through, we did get to eat at the Overlea and we made it downtown as well. And then it was time to move on…

We took the old road, US 1, from Baltimore to Washington and I relived a little more of my childhood as we passed the Laurel Shopping Center, where my mom and I used to hang out while my did went to the horse races (and where George Wallace was shot in 1972). Hechts and the Hot Shoppes have moved on, but the Giant Food is still there, original sign in place…

We met Juan Felipe at a Colombian restaurant with amazing food on Glebe Road in Arlington. He gave us the tour of the town (which is more appealing than I’d remembered) and put up with us until rush hour subsided, while somehow managing to avoid being photographed…

And then there was a very long drive back to Greensboro, which seemed even longer since it didn’t start until 8:00 at night…

I crawled out of bed before Mark awoke and snuck off to Weirton for some quality time with my Kroger. It was cold as a witch’s tit outside and I actually even saw some snow on my windshield going over the hill, but it all pretty much ended by the time we REALLY ventured out into the world for breakast at Ritter’s. I love Ritter’s…

And I hate Giant Eagle. After a couple of visits, I’ve decided that it is one of the single worst supermarket chains I’ve ever patronized. And I’ve patronized a lot of grocery chains. The stores are a tacky merchandising mess and the employees range from incompetent to down righ surly. Of course, they have a virtual monopoly in Pittsburgh, and it shows. Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest…

Today, we toured Shadyside and some of the outlying areas on the way south to Charleroi, which is where Mark’s father and aunt were born. We saw the old family homestead and drove through the surprisingly large and active downtown, before stopping at the Sunoco and getting on the Turnpike. We got a price break because the toll collectors were in the last day of a strike…

Lunch was at a very sucktastic Bob’s Big Boy in a service plaza. And we actually made it to Baltimore at a reasonable enough hour to have dinner there, at a passable pizza place in Timonium, before touring the bridges and tunnels by night…

Pittsburgh continues to be one of my favorite cities on a purely aesthetic basis. It’s just a quite fascinating place to drive around in, even though I realized I hadn’t driven any at all on my last visit and was therefore less familiar this time than I might have liked…

We had lunch at the Plaza Restaurant, where I was about half the age of every other patron in the place (and which made me consider asking for a booster seat for Mark), and then started finding our way around the neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, concentrating today more on the hills and the more dense areas by the rivers. We also visited The Strip so I could visit the old abandoned, factory which had so fascinated me in 1997. It was now even older, even more abandoned, and even more fascinating…

As evening hit, we made a 30-mile trek across West Virgina to Steubenville OH, adding two states to Mark’s list with very little effort. On the way back, in Weirton WV, I saw one of the most beautiful and ancient (but still open) Kroger stores ever, and vowed to return in the morning for a good photo…

As sometimes happens, we ended up having dinner at the Olive Garden…