Monday, September 28, 1992...
Drove down to Maryland this morning, a four-hour trip. From Hagerstown east across Maryland, I usually had two roads to choose from: US 40, which often followed I-70, and SR 144, the older highway. At the western edge of Frederick is a Fifties-style restaurant named for Barbara Fritchie; a little further, a motel quite evidently cobbled together from a series of tourist cabins.
The trip's biggest disappointment: the Enchanted Forest amusement park on the western
edge of Ellicott City has been largely replaced by an Enchanted Forest Safeway shopping
center whose sign is crowned by the original Enchanted Forest elf. Ugh! I followed Route 144
into Baltimore (and down block after block of row houses) before turning back north to US 40,
which runs for a mile and a half as a new-looking, six-lane sunken expressway bisecting the
western half of Baltimore before returning to ground level through the heart of downtown.
East of downtown, 40 becomes the Pulaski Highway; in this guise it serves as almost a 50-mile-long four-lane, divided separator between strip shopping centers, aged motels and diners, as well as roadside stands offering "pit beef." At one point there's a $2.00 toll to cross the Susquehanna.
40 retains the Pulaski Highway name for most of its 18-mile trek across Delaware, until joining with US 13 as DuPont Blvd. in New Castle and continuing with 13 almost to the Delaware Memorial Bridge to New Jersey. I stopped for the night in Wilmington, almost within sight of the bridge. This brings my total of states slept in to 45 -- other than Alaska and Hawaii, which don't count for road trip purposes, I need to add only Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. Maybe this fall...
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