Settling into Life in Annapolis, Maryland

Tuesday, October 28 — The last three days have been mellow. Now that it is so cold in the mornings, Christi has been finding it difficult to drag herself out of the warm bed to watch the sun rise. Instead, she falls back to sleep and misses the sun rises altogether.

On Sunday morning, Eric ran wing engine again to check to see if it was leaking exhaust. At first, it did smoke a little more, but he determined that was paint. After a few minutes, the smoking stopped Eric was happy to report that the wing engine exhaust was indeed fixed. In the early afternoon, Christi ran a few errands, including a trip to the closest grocery store, Giant. In the mid-afternoon, the Tiki kids came over to play board games with Keith. Here was a couple photos showing how beautiful the short drive between our marina and Tiki’s boat yard was.

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Drive to Pennsylvania to See the Autumn Leaves

Saturday, October 25 — We decided to take a drive to see the leaves change color. Eric found an app that said that as of this morning, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania was the closest place that had the best ratio of colorful leaves. What was interesting was that last night, it gave us a different town, so clearly, it’s being updated frequently.

Chambersburg was 2-hours northeast of us. The drive up in an of itself was pretty. This was what the highway looked like most of the way.

Traffic did seriously slow down outside of Baltimore, but it picked up again as soon as we passed Baltimore. We could see Baltimore from the highway, and we had nostalgia about the month that we’d spent there. Eventually, we left the highway for Highway 97, which was a two-lane road that ran through a rural area that looked to be mostly agricultural.

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The Stardew Valley Symphony On Our Last Day in DC

Dawn on Friday, October 3, 2025

As soon as we were done with school, we caught a ride share to Trader Joe’s. Due to the one-hour parking limit, last time we’d gone, we had only stocked up on what we needed. This time, we went back for passage food and “fun” items, such as snacks and desserts. Here was Christi waiting for the ride share.

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The National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC – Part 4: Fossils, Mammals and the Hirshhorn Museum of Art

continued… We moved on to the exhibit that Eric really wanted to see, Fossils. It covered 600-million years of history, and it was quite large. Eric was really interested and keenly read each and every display. Christi was ambivalent and half-heartedly read the displays that caught her attention. Keith was grossed out by skeletons and didn’t even want to be in the room. Keith constantly asked if we could leave yet and was frustrated when Eric kept saying no.

Since it was believed that life on Earth began in the ocean, it wasn’t surprising that the display on ocean creatures was large. Like in the Ocean Hall, they explained the evolution of many specific types of species. Scientists believed that in the early days of Earth, the world was very hot. Species evolved from simple organisms like algae and plankton into all kinds of complex species. The evolution helped them to adapt to their surroundings better, as well as to changes in their surroundings — either the species changed locations for one reason or another (ie to find food) or there was an environmental change (ie a salinity change). Some species left the water for land.

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The National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC – Part 3: Gems and Ocean Hall

continued… After crystals, we moved on to gems. Gems were mineral crystals that grew naturally within the earth that have been cut and polished. The crystal room had had quite a few people in it compared to the other rooms we’d been in, and the gem room was jam packed. There were so many people that it was hard to get a good look at the objects on display. There were several extraordinarily large gems featured, including a literal crystal ball.

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