Final day in Baltimore

With my train ticket booked for the 3.48pm train to Newark Airport, I had only three or four hours spare in Baltimore on Friday morning.

Every other time I've visited Baltimore, the viewing platform in the World Trade Centre  building has been closed for one reason or another.  It's closed Monday-Wednesday anyway, plus it tends to be closed around 11th September too.  It also closes for private events from time to time.

It's only $8 to go up to the 27th floor and it has windows on all five sides for looking out over the area.

Oriole Park in the distance; M&T Bank stadium
is just betweeen the two skyscrapers

This is an actual WTC working office building, so there's a special lift that doesn't go to the other floors that you have to use, although it wasn't very busy so I didn't have to wait to go up.

It was a hot day again, so it was nice to spend over an hour in this building, even though there's not all that much to do except look at the sights, read the placards about the views and the "art" on display.

You can see the entire inner harbour area with the marina, and you can see both the MLB and NFL stadia, which are quite close together.  There are some skyscrapers in the way, by you can just about see the purple seats in M&T Bank stadium, home of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team.  Oriole Park at Camden Years, the MLB stadium is right there behind the long, brick warehouse.

Looking south-east towards the ex-bridge

From here, you can also see in the distance the remains of the Key bridge that was partially destroyed by a ship running into it a while ago.

Despite being on the 27th floor, it's not actually the tallest building in downtown Baltimore, but it is the easiest one to get to the top of.  There's a restaurant in another building that's taller, but you have to have a reservation to get to it.

I met a couple from Sheffield who were doing a circular tour of the northeast, starting in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, going on to Washington DC, family in West Virginia, Boston and then New York to fly home.

I was able to give them some hints on getting around, since they'd actually walked from the railway station as they didn't know about the free bus.  I also let them know about the free Harbour Circulator boats.

After a while, I returned back to my hotel to pick up my bags and went to the bus stop to wait for the purple route circulator bus.  It was a bit late, so although I'd allowed quite a lot of time for it to be late and for the traffic, it only arrived at the station about 5 minutes before the train was due, which the Amtrak app on my phone confirmed was on time.

Even so, there was enough time to buy an iced coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts shop and hurry over to the platform - only then to find the train was running several minutes late!  It arrived 5 minutes later and then the power failed, but they managed to fix it and we were on our way 20 minutes later.

The train was very full, although there were still people sprawled out "asleep" across multiple seats.  My arms now ache after carrying my bag up to the front of the train and back again looking for seat.

Eventually, I shared a seat with a businessman who was resting rather than working and we made our way up towards New York.