Oct. 27th, 2012, Saturday: I sat outside the next morning, where it was still warm enough to not need a jacket and enjoyed a bowl of cereal with almond milk, while watching a guy with two boys float by in small motor boat fishing, while I waited for Brad to finish showering.
He returned, made coffee, joined me for cereal then we packed things up.
We headed to hwy.177 then stopped at a market to see if they had any highlighters. All they had were boxes of beer! We zigged our way through beautiful farmland, eventually connecting to I-15 veering south around Gettysburg where looking at the map we noticed we’d completed a figure 8 in our travels. From there we went south on 15 to Maryland.
It was still warm and in the upper 60’s. Stopping at Catoctin Fruit Orchard we admired the flowers, Brad collected seeds and I took pics.
We left with a delicious jug of fresh squeezed apple juice. Our next stop, purely by accident was Frederick Maryland. Brad loved Frederick - we both did - it was very historic, with lots of cool art, signs, and murals. We parked downtown, fed the meter and went for a walk.
Brad recognized several signs and murals from his sign trade magazines. We had fun trying on vintage clothes, chatting with gallery owners and getting the scoop on where the best murals and other galleries were. We drove across town to the local art center where we’d heard there were more murals to discover. While purchasing a hat, we were told about a particular angel mural that could be viewed through a window at the art center, where it looked proportionally correct. It was painted to look right from the window, but skewed when viewed while standing directly in front of it. Of course we had to go check that out!
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| Viewing the Angel through the window at The Delaplaine Visual Arts Center |
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| Viewing the Angel standing right in front of it. |
We spotted several other trompe l’oeil images along the canal walkway below the art center.
Frederick was a real cool discovery - one of our favorites of our road trip. It was very hard to be so close to Washington DC though, and not stop there, but we knew that’d be a multiple-day adventure just in itself.
We also were disappointed to have to head west sooner than we’d wanted, and not fulfill our wish to dip our toes into the Atlantic, but Hurricane Sandy was making its way towards the east coast, and we knew we should avoid its arrival. 
We kept going south on I-340 crossing the Potomac River into Virginia and West Virginia, all within seconds from each other on that stretch of highway. Stopping, we walked back onto the bridge over the Potomac, spotting several groups of rafters floating the river.
We also spied some poison ivy, looking glorious in its autumn splendor…
We continued on 340 as it became more of a backroad through West Virginia, then back into Virginia. We crossed over the beautiful glassy Shenandoah River multiple times, as the sun set and it became too dark for photos. We debated about finding somewhere to camp, but decided to keep going, and in Elkton we turned onto hwy. 33, then onto I-81 where we zipped along ‘til we stopped at a rest area, choosing to sleep there that night. It had a sparkling clean restroom, and soon we had our curtains up in the truck canopy, the cooler and bags moved into the front seat, ready to nod off early. Unfortunately it was too early - we were too warm again and the place was noisy with truck generators, the coming and going of cars with loud people, crying babies... not the best place to sleep, that’s for sure! It made for a long night.
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