Chris (aka Skittermagoo) and I flew up to MD a little early. I have family to visit and she had friends.

The following is our account of those days.

We flew out Wednesday (5/2) afternoon. We had no problems flying standby, thanks to our pal, Good Girl Purl, who was virtually with us all the way. (She could log in and see if we made our flights, etc. It was kind of awesome.)

A little knitting was done during the flights. We both started some socks for the trip; Chris started hers from the cuff down (Blue Moon Socks That Rock in the Seal Rock colorway), and I started some toe-up socks (Colinette Jitterbug in Jewel).

Once we landed in Baltimore and found my brother's house, we set off for some grub. (Flying is hungry work.) A quick walk into the center of town led us to a place to get some lump crab cakes and cold Yuengling beer!

This walk also gave us the opportunity to admire a second Spring - as flowers and trees are just blooming in MD. Of course, one disadvantage of this is that both Chris and I had a bit of an allergy attack. But they were beautiful allergies.

On Thursday, we headed into the city to meet up with Kathy. We picked her up and headed into Fells Point, a harbor town with eclectic mix of old and new. We ate lunch at a great Indian buffet, then headed over to the Baltimore Tattoo Museum.

No, it really wasn't to visit masterpieces of tattoo art. I was there for another tat, much to Kathy's horror. Chris, the tattoo artist (not the knitter), worked with me to modify the tattoo I got a few years back. (He worked on Matty's tattoo, so I knew he was good.)

The image is a mirror of my birds tattoo, but one bird is replaced with a ball of yarn and the vining flower has been changed to yarn. This is on my right shoulder (the original is on my left shoulder), and its a pretty good match. It did have to be placed a little higher, as not to cover up my first tattoo, a faded dragonfly.

After my ink, I met back up with Chris and Kathy at a cute lil' coffee shop before heading home. (Oh yeah! Besides room and board, my brother also lent us his Jeep for tooling around town. Is this repayment for all the years of torture?)

Later that night, we met up with Chris' (and mine now, right?) friend, Kim, for dinner. We went to the same great Italian restaurant that we (Chris, Petra, Kim, and I) went to last year! But this time, no one was gleeked on!

Friday was another beautiful, sunny day and Lindsay wouldn't let us just 'sit and knit', so we joined her and headed down to the Baltimore FlowerMart. (Which is a festival in it's own right.)

I'm not certain that I got the gist of FlowerMart, but it was fun. Sure, there were flowers to buy, wear, and do just about anything else with. But it was the people-watching that I found great.

We didn't stay at the FlowerMart for long, and headed home to prepare the meal and house for our incoming guests. More on their invasion in the next post!

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