I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, like author Michael Chabon. His article Maps and Legends came to my attention from this thread on Metafilter. After reading the article itself and the comments of a MeFi poster named breezeway, I wrote the following:

I’m another product of Columbia, although substantially later than Chabon and breezeway - I lived there from 1985-1998. And yet the experience was not substantially different, because Columbia still likes to think it is a utopia even though it hasn’t been for years. It’s got crime, social strata, suburban sprawl…but it’s always pushing the idea of being such a fabulous New Town like it was in the 1960s.

Like breezeway, I graduated from Wilde Lake HS - the only class (1997) to attend all three schools. The crunchy granola old building from 1971, the temporary building in Clarksville River Hill, and the new shiny one on the site of the old one. Honestly, the old Wilde Lake was a lot like the old Columbia - there were no walls for many years, and even when I got there in 1993 there were still no ceilings - you could hear everything everywhere. The library media center was literally in the center of the building. It was a place designed for interaction, learning from each other, and communication. The new Wilde Lake is more for compartementalized learning styles - you are in this class, learning this at this time. You can’t see other classes, you can only learn from what’s going on in your room. It’s like you’ve got blinders on…like the rest of the world.

This sounds overly philosophical, even to me - but I think it’s true. It’s obvious to someone who’s seen both buildings - they really speak to what’s going on in the rest of the city.

I’m home today because I injured my back this weekend somehow. Anyway, as a followup to my earlier post, I went ahead and wrote to the Baltimore Sun.
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My mom (sunnydale47) sent me a link to a Baltimore Sun article called Defunct park’s admirers seek a storybook ending. The article included this:

The storybook park sat decaying for years, until Martha Clark of Ellicott City resolved to change that.

Clark’s quest began in August 2004 [...]

I made a post about the Enchanted Forest in 2002, and I started the Enchanted Forest Preservation Society in 2003. It was originally on Yahoo Groups, and in April 2004 it got its own website. I was even interviewed by the Baltimore Sun in November 2003. And yet they’ve forgotten all about us, and attributed everything to Martha Clark.

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate everything the Clarks have done. But they were not acting alone, and I wish there could have been acknowledgment of that fact. The only comment was:

Clark was aware that interested groups had tried to reopen The Enchanted Forest and she believed a lack of parking space would prevent the storybook park from ever reopening.

This might refer to EFPS, but it more likely refers to Friends of Enchanted Forest, an earlier, ill-fated group that never really got anywhere. I posted in the EFPS forum about how we were left out - I wonder if anyone else feels the way I do, or if it’s just because this feels like “my baby” even though I’m no longer as involved as I used to be.

I have a question for those of you who live outside the National Capital Area (loosely defined as between Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore, Maryland). Does this guided tour () look interesting to you?

My partner and I went to Turkey with Go Ahead Vacations in 2001, and we get their vacation catalog quite frequently. In fact, it’s a little too frequent - the catalogs are basically all the same. Today, though, we got a special “New Tours” catalog, and it included a tour called Birthplace of a Nation: Williamsburg to Gettysburg. For a nine-day vacation they are asking $1,999 which just seems really expensive to me. But it occurs to me that maybe it feels expensive because I’ve lived here my whole life. I have been to every stop on the tour at least once, and sometimes more than once. So I’m wondering - does that look like an interesting tour to non-locals? Would you pay for the convenience of having a packaged tour like this? (Obviously the whole thing could be done for less money if you stayed with friends, etc.) If money were no object, would you want to go on this tour?

I went geocaching with my dad today! We went to Savage Park, which is near where he lives. We started out by finding the Northbound Trading Post, which is located at the only rest area along I-95 between Dale City VA and Maryland House north of Baltimore - a distance of about 100 miles - and so there were a lot of people around. The GPS led us straight to the right area, and I didn’t even have to touch the foliage to spot the cache. I’d been meaning to pick this one up for a while, so I was glad to check it off my list.

We headed to the park next, where we found four caches - all of the ones up at the Wincopin end of the park. I’m not sure which one was my favorite - they were all pretty good. I think the nicest location was Hog’s Heaven and it was a nice cache too. I left a couple of stuffed Neopets toys from McDonald’s - even though people usually deride McDonald’s toys being left in caches, I am pretty sure that Neopets is popular enough to be more valuable than the other stuff.

I would estimate that we spent a little over two and a half hours walking around in the park. It was pretty good exercise, as there were some hills to go up and down, but as we approached the car I realized my knee was hurting (and it still aches). So we skipped Bunch of Savages in this Town, a micro at the far end of the park. We went out for lunch, and nobody harrassed me about bringing my own food, which is nice. I didn’t sleep well at all last night, so I went home after lunch. But I had a really good time! I’m looking forward to geocaching with my dad again soon. (You can read his post about today here.)

• I am mildly disappointed that I did not make it onto the Babes of Xmas list, but I came in #106 out of 277, which is not bad. Thank you to the 39 people who voted for me a total of 90 times!
• I found this collection of antique photos of Baltimore, including this cool one of the Power Plant pre-corporate influence. Another cool one, of the B&O Building is here - kind of eerie!
• I really, really should not interpret important meetings before having some form of caffeine. This is especially true if said meeting involves a lot of voicing. Because that meeting, um, sucked.
• I’m still obsessed with Faerie Bubbles.