The AFSBCVFFE

           Since we are world travelers and glamorous vacations hold no allure for us, we decided to spend Spring Break enjoying the relaxing sun and sand of Southern Ohio and Northern Indiana. (For my friends unfamiliar with U.S. geography, this sentence is pure irony.) Actually, a combination of a need to start SOMEWHERE with college hunting, coupled with a desire to see people we had known for longer than a few months, spurred us to embark upon the Admiraal Family Spring Break College Visit Friends and Family Extravaganza (AFSBCVFFE). Portions of the schedule are included (is there some kind of career where I can receive a paycheck for being bossy and typing up snarky schedules for people?).

Saturday, April 12 Leave at 8 a.m.

Drive to Cincinnati. We will stay with Uncle Jeff and Aunt Nancy, 

except for those children who wish to work out their own sleeping

                                      arrangements with friends or local homeless shelters. Let me know if         

you need assistance in this endeavor.

Of course, being pathologically early, we left at about 7:50 a.m. This drives Johanna crazy, but she should know what to expect by now. The decisions about what colleges to visit was made by the scientific process of looking for schools close to Cincinnati or Indianapolis that both Drew and the parents could live with. The 8-hour drive from Towson to Cincinnati went surprisingly quickly, helped along by an extra driver (Drew), Hercule Poirot on CD, some preemptive homework, and several naps. Upon arrival in town, we depositing Kid 2 at her home away from home on Weavers Lane, and the rest of us enjoyed dinner with Eric’s cousin’s family, whom we affectionately call “the other Admiraals,” and whom we have known long enough and well enough to use kind of like a hotel. As guilty as I felt about this imposition, I do have to say that there is nothing like a hotel staffed by some of your favorite people, who are family members, no less.

Sunday, April 13 10:30 a.m. Primitive Baptist Church. Again, if you want to work out your 

                               own transportation to another church, knock yourself out. Just remember      
                                  that you also need someone to feed you, as you will miss the best lunch in
                                  town. You will also miss the West Cincinnati Foursquare Playoffs.

                             2:30 p.m. return to Aunt Nancy’s; meet Jacob. Karin will drop Eric and Drew 

                             at Nisbet Park and then drop Jacob and Lucas at the Chumleys. Because she 
                             is a nice wife/mom, she will also return to Nisbet Park to pick up the boys.

                             6:30 p.m. Eric and Karin -- Dinner with Journeys

Drew -- If you don’t find something better to do, the grownups would  
                        love to have you join us! We’re not boring at all. Not even a little bit.

I had the chance to walk on the bike trail at Nisbet Park while I waited for Eric and Drew to finish their 8-mile run. It’s a place laden with memories for us -- bike rides to the Hawaiian Ice shack, dinner at the Works restaurant, SMAC cross country practices, picnics listening to bands (and once watching a belly dancing troupe perform). The PLC started to set in with a vengeance (see earlier post “Moi Quand Je Pleure”).

In case you are curious, Drew found something more interesting to do than eat with the grownups. I think it involved basketball.

Monday, April 14 7 a.m. Karin runs with Tricia

                              10 a.m. Visit Xavier University (Schott Hall, 1496 Dana Ave,

                              Cincinnati). This is a 45-minute informational presentation and a

                 1-hour walking tour of the campus.

I was not surprised that Drew liked Xavier, which feels like a big-city campus, and where he received a free t-shirt and we all got cookies as part of the campus tour given by a bouncy sophomore who seemed to know everyone on campus. I was, however,  surprised how much I liked the school. They are very serious about being Jesuit, which as far as I could tell, involves education and service. I also liked the cookies.

                                3:30 p.m. (ish) leave for Cedarville. Drew and Johanna will spend the

                                 night on uncomfortable floors in drafty, or possibly overheated, dorm

                                rooms where loud music will keep them awake until the wee hours.

                                The rest of us will enjoy the luxury accommodations Chez Admiraal

                                and return in the morning for the tour.

Leaving for Cedarville was delayed by the untimely escape of the Patricks’ dog when we picked Johanna up at their house. Fortunately, a family member with the electric zapper to the dog’s collar arrived, and we merely benefitted from a little extra exercise chasing the dog all over the neighborhood. 

Cedarville is definitely not a big city college. It has cornfields on three sides and a cemetery on the fourth. Eric and I ended up staying in town as well, at the Hearthstone Inn, the only overnight accommodations available. Fortunately, the Inn is very nice, with large, clean rooms and Bible verses on the walls. I think we scandalized the proprietress by asking where we could get a glass of wine. Cedarville, as it turns out, is a dry town. She sent us to Yellow Springs, a nearby town home to Antioch College of Vietnam protest fame. Our waitress was so tattooed that she reminded me of Mystique from X-men. She was very sweet, though, and the food was outstanding.

                              Tuesday, April 15 9 - 4 p.m. Visit Cedarville. 

Drew and Johanna indeed had not slept much (welcome to dorm life), and the weather had turned bitterly cold. We had to scrape the snow off the car to drive the mile or so to campus from the Inn. These were not the most auspicious conditions for a campus visit. Nevertheless, Cedarville did by far the best job of making us feel welcome, with a personal admissions counsellor, free meal tickets for all, and the opportunity to meet professors. The running coach met with the kids and Eric while I watched the de rigeur informational presentation (45-minute commercial). Cedarville, as a friend said, feels like a four-year youth group meeting with some good academics thrown in. I liked it a lot. It looks like a place where student could combine a good education with very clear aids to spiritual growth, and meet some fine friends into the bargain. Drew was less excited (I think it was the cornfields). Johanna said that if her friends went there, she would, too. This is her college search plan, and she’s sticking to it.

                        Wed., April 16 Relax at the Stepping Stones

We were very ready for this day of rest at my parents’ farm in Indiana. They fed us, took us on a walk by the creek to see the spring flowers, and let us sleep a lot.

                        Thursday, April 17 Noonish, leave for Butler. Tour and information session is 2 - 4 p.m.

                                                    Spend the night with Hodges.

Butler, in Indianapolis, is another smallish school in a largish city. It has a very different feel from Xavier though, with a campus of close to 300 acres and a Greek system. Since the school’s 2010 trip to basketball’s NCAA finals, applications have trebled, and the informational presentation was much more about how to get into Butler than about why one might want to go there (doesn’t everyone want to come here?). The campus was lovely, but I did get a whiff of college party atmosphere that set my maternal nerves pinging. Drew loved it (of course), despite the lack of t-shirts, cookies, or commemorative mugs. I’m telling myself it was his Indiana roots calling to him.

We spent the night with my cousin and his family, and stayed up way too late playing games and laughing with my cousin, his wife, and their four children. In the morning, they introduced us to Big Dave’s, a local deli where we ate breakfast sandwiches of eggs, bacon, ham, and hash browns (anyone want a carrot?). Luc and Jo got to climb with Hayden, their oldest cousin, who conveniently works in a rock gym in Indianapolis. 

                          Friday, April 18 Return to Stepping Stones to do laundry.

                         We also took another walk in the woods and watched Hoosiers (of course).

                          Saturday, April 19 Back to Baltimore!

The East Coast Literary Club Baltimore Tour

I don’t know what most people think of Baltimore, but before we moved here, my main association was with the T.V. show Homicide: Life on the Street, which ran from 1993-1999. In the good old days when we had kids who went to bed before us, watching Homicide was something Eric and I looked forward to. Now there’s this other show filmed in Baltimore called  The Wire. Apparently, the two programs are based on the same book. These shows may be part of the reason Baltimore has kind of a seedy reputation. The other part, of course, may be that Baltimore is (according to some sources, anyway) the 8th most dangerous city in the U.S. (that’s down from a few years ago). The shows are, I guess, not all fiction.

As good Baltimorians will attest, however, there’s a lot more to the city than crime. Baltimore actually has a pretty significant literary history. Since most members of my family cannot think of anything more boring than searching around to see where famous authors once sat (or slept, or walked, or died), I had to wait for some friends to visit before taking the Baltimore Literary Tour. Fittingly, my friends are part of a venerable Ohio book club, so we (I -- it was unilateral) decided to make this the East Coast branch.

The Literary tour began with a visit to La Paix in Towson, which is where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived for a bit in the 1930s while his wife, Zelda, was being treated at Sheppard Pratt psychiatric hospital. The actual house burned down while Fitzgerald was living there, but there is still a street called La Paix, so we felt very close to F. Scott while walking on it. The other advantage of La Paix is that it is only about a mile from our house. The evening continued with a visit from two mice, whom the warm weather had apparently awaked from hibernation (do mice hibernate?). The mice scampered unrepentantly around the living room while Eric chased them with a broom (He broke the broom, but the mice escaped). I imagined a giant mouse nest in the walls, and experienced deep thankfulness that neither of my guests was suriphobic. To tie them in with the literary theme of this post, we will call them Edgar and Allen.

The next day was drizzly, but, undaunted, we set off for Fitzgerald site #2, in Bolton Hill, a charming, 19th-century neighborhood north of the Inner Harbor. We saw Fitzgerald’s house (where he wrote Tender Is the Night while poor Zelda was at Johns Hopkins), and we learned that he was only one of several luminaries who made Bolton Hill home. Others include former president Woodrow Wilson, Alice Hamilton (Harvard’s first female professor), and author Edith Hamilton. I understand why they would all want to live in the neat row houses on the quiet, tree-lined streets.

F. Scott Fitzgerald slept here.

After that, we parked at the train station. We planned to take Baltimore’s free bus, the Charm City Circulator, which has three routes in the city’s most popular tourist areas. It turns out weekend parking at Penn Station is only $2 a day -- I highly recommend this option. The only slight drawback was that the drizzle was developing into a steady drip, complete with wind. If you know me, though, you know I would rather walk miles in the rain than navigate city traffic and parking. And if my fellow travelers didn’t feel the same way? I could always apologize later. The Purple Line took us to Mount Vernon (Baltimore version), where we found the Washington Monument (Baltimore version). The latter, like the “real” monument in D.C., was encased in scaffolding, so we couldn’t climb its 200-plus steps for a panoramic view of Baltimore. With the grey skies, it was unlikely the panoramic view would be very impressive, anyway. We saw the location where Star-Spangled Banner lyricist Francis Scott Key died. A church now stands on the site, which used to hold the house of Key’s son-in-law. 

Francis Scott Key died here.

     In Mount Vernon, we also saw the Stafford Hotel, another placed where Fitzgerald stayed (apparently, he had itchy feet). We saw H.L. Menken’s house and ate Greek food at a local cafe. The highlight of this part of this stop, though, was the Peabody Library. I had read that it was “the most beautiful room in Baltimore,” but that it was closed on Saturdays. Providentially, the library was open. I haven’t seen every room in Baltimore, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the most beautiful room in the world. Apparently anyone can use it, and not very many people do. I’m going to take my kids there on a field trip so that they can see what a real card catalog looks like. 

It is difficult for a cell-phone camera to capture the beauty of the Peabody Library.

Even the card catalogs are works of art.

We walked then to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Clearly we, along with anyone else who wants to accomplish anything besides saying church names, are going to call it the Baltimore Basilica. The basilica isn’t literary, but is historical. (I figured we could expand the tour). The church was designed by Benjamin Latrobe, the same man who designed the U.S. Capitol building. The relationship is obvious. The Basilica has columns and domes, and a white, light interior, just like the Capitol. It was the first cathedral in America, and while it may be disappointing to fans of the gothic, it is, fittingly, very American-looking.

The rain intensified. The wind picked up. We walked past Lexington Market (of Wire fame), trying not to see any drug dealers. The weather was perfect for Westminster Burying Ground -- final resting place of that restless soul, Edgar Allen Poe. 

Poe's gravesite, and the whole Westminster Hall and Burying Grounds, are appropriately creepy.

     We didn’t linger long at Poe's grave, though. Wet feet and the time -- around 2:30 -- made it imperative that we find a coffee shop. So we boarded the Orange Line and headed for Fells Point. On the way to The Daily Grind (a large coffee shop which seems to double as an office for several young entrepreneurs), we passed the building where Homicide was filmed (okay, now it is a literary, historical, and pop culture tour). We also caught a glimpse of The Horse You Came in On -- the bar where Poe was last seen alive. 

The coffee gave us enough energy to make it to the Purple Line and back to Penn Station, where we picked up the car. We had wanted to see the gravesite of J. Gresham Machen, who was buried in Green Mount Cemetery, close to the train station. The unabating rain and the passing time made us decide to end the tour at this point. I realized later that we had also neglected the birthplace of Upton Sinclair on North Charles. The house is no longer there, but we could have driven past. I guess that will be on the next tour. Am I the only one nerdy enough to think it might be exciting to drive past the place where the childhood home of a famous author once stood? 
        As a footnote, Edgar and Allen, like their namesake, met their demise party as a result of their appetites. The peanut butter in our traps proved too alluring for the poor little guys. Poe the mouse either doesn't exist, or he has a peanut allergy.