My Baltimore adventure
June 15th, 2010 at 5:56 pm ET
There are no hotel rooms in Washington tonight — certainly none at a price I feel comfortable paying. Given the choice between staying in extra-Beltway territory (seriously, not happening) and an adventure, I’ve chosen adventure: I’m on the MARC Camden Line to Baltimore ($7), where I’m going to have a microvacation tonight.
A microvacation consists of: having dinner in a nice restaurant in Mount Vernon, coming back to a nice tourist-class hotel (“good value for the money,” say the reviews on Hotels.com) where I’ll sit in the room and do the same work and watch the same TV I’d do in a DC hotel for double the room rate, and having a Commuter Adventure back to DC in the morning.
So far my review of MARC is: crowded, dirty, unromantic. The conductor (a CSX employee) threw the ticket stub on the floor — you won’t find that happening on Amtrak — and the guy next to me is on his second can of beer.
But seven bucks — I’m not sure you could get from Staten Island to Manhattan on the express bus for that. And I’m going to Baltimore, ancestral home of diner waitresses and Pecker … and … and Bromo-Seltzer! And other stuff too. I forget. All I know is Mount Vernon is pretty and I get to have coffee there in the morning before I run to Catch My Train.
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Rich Mintz blogs on online fundraising and social media, American history and culture, bicycling and urbanism, food, technology, and other topics. Professionally, he's an expert in fundraising, constituency development, and social media for nonprofits, cultural organizations, cause-related marketers, and corporations. He is based in New York, where he serves as Vice President, Strategy, for 
