Baltimore

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American Visionary Art Museum Entrance. That is all mosaic work made from glass and mirrors. It's stunning in person.

Steve and I left for our vacation at Virginia Beach Saturday morning, stopping to spend the night in Baltimore. We'll be stopping to spend the night in Philadelphia on our way home. Just 'cuz. We've never been to any of these places. We'd talked about visiting the Inner Harbor in Baltimore before but our vacation the last couple of years have occurred in April and it seemed to early weather-wise, for Baltimore.

I put all the photos (just 13) in my Flickr account, but I'll mention some highlights here.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Gretchen for turning us onto the American Visionary Art Museum! I had looked at their website when you first mentioned it to me a few months ago but it really doesn't do the museum justice. So talking about it again the night before we left made me want to visit.

It's hard to describe but the museum has been called, "A treasure house full of the most outstanding creations born of intuition and self-styled imagination." It's offbeat. It's disturbing. I loved it.

One of my favorite exhibits is found here: PostSecret.com The artist requested people send him postcards sharing a secret - that was true and had never been shared with anyone else. These postcards are mounted behind a wave of Plexiglas that goes up the staircases of the museum. I didn't read them all but I read a lot. In researching this just now, I see there are books of the postcards available. I just read some more postcards on the website and some of the follow-up stories. As a lover of biographies and autobiographies, I'm 100% addicted to this project now.

There was one exhibit that brought me to tears, I have to say. When I told Steve that, he said it was his favorite piece too. (But that was before we saw the (10' long?) ship made entirely of toothpicks.) I don't know what it was made of or the story behind it because I could barely look at it. It was a life sized child on a bike, I don't know, burned, skeletal, but bright red. The child was holding a sign that said "Every soldier was once a child."

I just researched this piece some more and for some reason can't upload the photo to this blog, but you can see the piece I'm talking about here.

From there we spent the afternoon at the Aquarium. Unfortunately for us, it was a Sunday so there were many families with kids there. It was hard to see the exhibits because the displays were not very big and there were sooo many kids. That part was a little disappointing. We're sort of jaded, having seen a very cool shark exhibit in Las Vegas last year, right in our hotel. One walked through a glass tunnel so fish were swimming all around you. That would be the difference - in Las Vegas, money is no object. The Baltimore Aquarium is supported by memberships and donations.

But the dolphin show was a lot of fun. I'd never seen one and Steve said he last saw one 36 years ago. We also stayed for the 15 minute 4-D video which was very cool. I hope I don't spoil this for anyone who gets to experience it but the seats are rigged with special effects. Throughout the piece at appropriate places, you felt a blast of air on the back of your neck, water sprayed in your face, "snakes" tickling your legs and a sharp poke in the back. Oh, and the seat vibrated, like when the swarm of bees was on the screen. We all yelped EVERY single time, even when you could figure it was coming. I'm soooo glad we didn't know about it in advance because, while I generally don't like surprises and don't like being "scared" - this was totally fun. Sorry to have spoiled it for anyone heading there - but you'll still be surprised, guaranteed.

The thing is, in retrospect, we realized how they pull this off. The theater is a bit dark when we arrived and there was already a related video playing so we were totally distracted and didn't notice the box on the back of the seat in front of us. It was all very well done. It had been a long day so we considered skipping this but I'm so glad we didn't.

This entry is long enough - more to come later.

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