Harbour Walk

Today, I walked around the northern side of the harbour as I did last year, but I enjoyed it a lot more this time as I wasn't feeling ill.

There is a path along the waterfront, that occasionally had to go a block inland to avoid maintenance works.

There are lots of flowers in the planters that were dotted at occasional points along the path.  A lot of the housing looked very expensive.

I stopped off at Fell's Point on the way.  There are lots of shops for tourists here, including restaurants that I've eaten at before.

Many seem to have shut up shop, although it's hard to tell whether that's just for the season or permanent.  I note that the Riptide by the Bay, a restaurant I once ate at, now seems to have closed down, going by the padlock on the door.

I was able to get an iced coffee at a bakery, though and have a croissant.  That's the kind of place that locals use a lot.

I had made a reservation for 4pm at the Rusty Scupper, because I've been there before and I know it's really good.  It is on the opposite side of the harbour to my hotel and walk, though, so I planned to take the harbour connector boats back.

Eventually, I made it around to the Canton waterfront park where the free Harbour Connector boat service runs from.  It's quite strange, because the water taxi boats are used to provide this service with a small sign saying that today, it's identifying as the Harbour Connector.  At weekends, I think the same boats operate the harbour loop ($18 per ride, or $20 for an all-day pass!)

Each HC route is just one boat shuttling back and forth between two points, so the every half hour departures only take about 10 minutes to actually travel across, and the every 15 minute services are even quicker.

I just walked to the restaurant from my hotel, as it only takes 20 minutes to walk the other way around the harbour.  I arrived just a couple of minutes after my reservation time, which was fine, as it was fairly empty being quite early.

The food was excellent again, although as with the Franciscan Crab in San Francisco, and as I thought I'd remembered from last year, my server Tomi wasn't able to charge my credit card.

Unlike the Franciscan Crab, where it was a a huge performance including photocopying my passport and cards, they are used to it here and I just had to go over to the till and enter the PIN when it asked and then it all authorised normally.

It has been warm and humid here.  Apparently it's the remnants of a storm from the south that's petered out from being a hurricane, but just sent the weather up the east coast.

After dinner, I returned to my hotel to drop off my backpack and pick up my Giants hat and set off for the game.