Another hot day, so we thought we’d get our sightseeing done early in the day. First stop was to be the Maryland State House. This is a view of it from our boat.
We walked up the narrow streets and felt like we were back in time. I think I maybe said earlier that Annapolis has more buildings from the 1700’s than any other town in America.
The dome of the State House is spectacular. The statue in front is Baron De Kalb. Not really sure who he is, but I don’t think he’s related to the seed guy. This building was the first peacetime capitol of the United States.
We should have realized we would be required to go through security and Roscoe had his trusty little Swiss Army knife in this pocket so we were given the boot out the door. Not wanting to walk all the way back to the boat we looked for a place to ditch it for a while. Around the corner from the State House is the Maryland Inn. John Adams and Ben Franklin use to stay here. Seemed perfect. No one was in the sitting area where we entered so we put the knife in a drawer of a table.
When we arrived back at the State House, we were told a special visitor was coming and the House was shut down. Turned out it was Mrs. Obama. So back we went to retrieve the knife.
We took a trolley tour of Annapolis, which was interesting and covered much more territory than we could have on foot. We were glad we toured the Naval Academy yesterday as they were closing that down too because of Mrs. Obama.
We stopped for a cold one in the Ram’s Head Pub. It is down the stairs off the street. Located in a basement it is a 250 year old pub. It was cool, dark and had good beer.
Returned to the hotel, ditched the knife and tried to get in to the State House again. Success!!!
This is the dome from the inside. It is constructed completely out of Cypress wood. Which termites don’t eat. And the wood is all joined with wood pegs, no nails. England taxed nails.
In this room George Washington resigned his commission as commander in chief of the Continental Army to the Congress. This is a huge deal because it set the precedent of the authority of the civilian government over the military.
This is a full size mannequin of Washington and is supposedly pretty realistic because it was made from a life mask they took of him. He was about the same size as Roscoe. The average man in those days was 5 feet so Washington seemed like a giant.
On the very top of the dome is a lighting rod, made by Ben Franklin. The dome had been struck by lighting and burned 3 times. (Not sure on that, but at least a couple of times) So Ben made a lighting rod, which is still doing the job as the dome gets struck with lighting every so often.
The locals were grousing a bit over Mrs. Obama being in town as their city had to pay for the security. One guy was calling it "her $200,000 ice cream cone".
It is good ice cream though!!!
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