All of Maryland

 

As my Facebook posts show – for those of you paying attention – I’ve been touring around Maryland recently.  I grew up in Montgomery Village and consider the 355 corridor from Gaithersburg down to Bethesda to be my home turf.  As an adult I discovered Baltimore (and have blogged about it in the past).  The rest of the state fell by the wayside until I finally decided to see it all, once and for all.  I’ve lived in Paris, France, visited lots of Europe and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, so not seeing my home state in its entirety with a surplus of COVID19-inflicted free time struck me an egregious oversight. 

 Moreover, I attended undergraduate college at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is the state university’s main campus.  North and South Hill dorms are named after Maryland counties, whereas the 11 high rise dorms are named after county seats (no Rockville Hall, by the way).  I was in Hagerstown Hall for freshman year, Talbot Hall for sophomore year and fall semester of junior year, then Montgomery Hall for spring semester junior year and all of senior year, plus New Leonardtown apartments for all of summer 1988 and first session of summer 1990, before graduating once and for all.

 Already Knew.   Montgomery, Prince George’s, Frederick, Washington, Howard, Anne Arundel, Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and Charles County.  Back in the 70s our family went to Ocean City twice, but obviously that was some time ago.   Most of my clients are Vietnamese, and you’ll probably find very few of them on the Eastern Shore.  Moreover, much of my practice is divorce, and so long as one of the parties lives somewhere in Maryland, you can file in any county, even if neither party lives in that particular county (so long as both parties agree).  An uncontested divorce in Maryland will have a single hearing before a master, and with the COVID these days, even those hearings are now held over the phone and not in the courthouse.  These days I’ve been filing all of them in Montgomery County.   

 Mission 1.  Garrett & Allegheny Counties (county seats:  Oakland and Cumberland).  The far northwest counties, surrounded by West Virginia and Pennsylvania.  Highly picturesque and aesthetically beautiful.  I’m glad I visited them for the first time ever. 

Mission 2.   Carroll & Harford Counties (county seats:  Westminster & Bel Air).  I had visited my mother in the hospital just southeast of Leesburg, Virginia, took the highway up past Frederick, Maryland, and stopped by Westminster, which is a fairly small, old-fashioned town.  Carroll County is between Frederick County and Baltimore County, bordering on Pennsylvania (the famous Mason-Dixon Line).   Then southeast to the Baltimore Beltway (695), up around northeast to Bel Air, which is just off I-95 northeast of Baltimore; Harford County also borders Pennsylvania in between Baltimore County and Cecil County, the latter being the northeast corner of Maryland, bordering Delaware.  

 Mission 3.   St. Mary’s & Calvert Counties (county seats:  Leonardtown & Prince Frederick).    After passing through Prince George’s and Charles County, you’ll eventually hit St Mary’s County, with lots of farms.  A few days earlier my office manager, Nancy, had me take her down here – just 5 minutes from Leonardtown – looking for live chickens.  No luck, but the way was paved for the Leonardtown mission.  As it happens, in addition to two vacations in Ocean City prior to January 1979, our father also took us on a weekend excursion to Solomon’s Island, which is right across the river in Calvert County, and actually on the way to Prince Frederick from Leonardtown.  Our 1970s trip to Solomon’s Island was a rainy weekend, and our dad took us to a tobacco plantation.  This time around the weather was much nicer, but I simply passed through Solomon’s Island and only spent brief moments in each county seat.  After Prince Frederick, the route took me back up past Lower Marlboro – not exactly next to Upper Marlboro – and eventually back up to the beltway near Andrews Air Force Base.

 Mission 4.   Cecil County, Kent County. Queen Anne’s County, Caroline County (county seats:  Elkton, Chestertown, Centreville, and Denton).  Starting from Elkton, Maryland, close by to Delaware, I went south through the northern portion of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.   I had literally never been here before, even in passing, the closest being passing by on I-95 to/from Delaware and New Jersey.   Highly rural, lots of farms, not much to see here.  The county seats are small and indistinguishable, though Denton likes to brag that FDR came through to give a speech in 1938 or so.    From Denton I returned home over the Bay Bridge and then down I295 to 395 and back to Virginia.

 Mission 5.   Talbot County, Dorchester County, Wicomico County, Somerset County, and Worcester County (county seats:  Easton, Cambridge, Salisbury, Princess Anne, and Snow Hill).   I wrapped this up by visiting Ocean City, albeit briefly.   This route took me across the Bay Bridge to Easton, Cambridge and Salisbury, then the detour to Princess Anne and Snow Hill – neither are off of Route 50, the main highway from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City – then up to Ocean City itself.

 Back on Memorial Day Weekend, 1990, my buddy Phil and I were puzzled that the Cellar, our favorite bar in College Park, was empty on Friday night.  The Cellar’s bouncer suggested that everyone had gone to Ocean City for the weekend.   At the spur of the moment, we left College Park at midnight, drive on Route 50 with no traffic in the middle of the night, and reached Ocean City at 3 a.m.   We slept in the car, only to be woken not by a local cop, but by heavy rain.  When the weather report promised a whole weekend of this, we set off, westbound on Route 50, arriving back in rainy, overcast College Park at noon.  That was the extent of my Eastern Shore travels as an adult, until last weekend’s solo road trip.   

 This time around I was alone and reached Ocean City around 5 p.m. on a sunny, warm, Saturday afternoon.  I hit the main drag from Route 50, drove north up to the Carousel Hotel, and spent about 5 minutes there looking around, and 5 minutes on the beach in street clothes.  It looks like the hotel is in the same shape and condition it was back in the late 70s when we visited it.  I took I 90 west to Route 50 and was home in about 2.5 hours.

Maryland ranks 42^nd in the US in size, and 19^th in population.   Leaving aside Baltimore, which is six times more populated than Columbia, the second largest city, only Ellicott City (Howard), Frederick (Frederick) and Rockville (Montgomery) are county seats in the top 10.