5 States 5 Days

I had a conference in Baltimore and decided to take the fam with me to make a road trip out of it. We started out last Saturday, and made a stop in Chambersburg, PA that night. Chambersburg is about 20 miles from Gettysburg.
We toured downtown Gettysburg at night (no ghost tours this time...), had dinner at a Chinese restaurant called Ping's Cafe. The crispy beef was absolutely delicious! The kids loved the egg drop soup. After dinner we walked around for a little bit to check out the different buildings - seems like all of them were used as a makeshift hospital during Civil war. We walked by the infamous Farnsworth Inn (supposedly one of the most haunted places in the US) and saw the bullet holes on the side of the building. On our drive back to the hotel in Chambersburg, we decided to cruise through the battlefields, and it was kinda creepy in the dark.
We headed back to Gettysburg the next day, and stopped at a tourist trap called Mr. Ed's Peanut and Candy shop. They had a talking elephant statue out front that came from King's Island, Cincinnati! I have to say, that their peanuts were worth the stop. Fresh roasted!
We did the auto tour of the battlefields, and ended up in the cemetary where Lincoln gave his speech. When we got back to our car, something messed up the electronics...the clock and temperature was all messed up, the seat belt light kept blinking even though we had our seat belts on... and not only that, but the Pokemon game in the game boy had reset itself... spoooooky!
At that point we were ready to hit the road to Baltimore. The drive wasn't too bad until we got in to the inner harbor area. Little did I know it was the last day of some sort of Comic con, and the traffic was absolutely horrendous. I think we were stuck for like 2 hours trying to get to our hotel. We stayed in Baltimore for 2 and a half days for my conference, and discovered a couple of local restaurants. Narita is a really good sushi restaurant, cheap too. Atwaters in Belvedere market has good, organic soup & really good artisan bread. We stayed in the inner harbor area for the most part, and there were a lot of things to do there. I think the kids loved the aquarium and the paddle boats the best.
After Baltimore we headed to DC. Our first stop was Arlington cemetary, where grandmother is buried. We got lost for a little while after that.. the streets were totally confusing and the neighborhoods we got lost in were really run down and it was totally unnerving. But we made it out of DC back to our cabin out in the woods in MD. The next day we went back to DC and saw the White house, Lincoln's memorial, Air and space museum, the Smithsonian, the Presidential Memorial, and the Capitol building. We ate in Chinatown for lunch, and the food was awesome (and cheap)!
The drive back to Ohio wasn't too bad, I think the kids were all tired from walking around so much the day before, so they were totally content...
All in all a good trip. Woud love to go back to DC again...