Vacation Part 2 Happy 4th of July - Baltimore Inner Harbor 2012

After we left the beach and ate, we checked into our hotel that Shawn had booked at the Inner Harbor. We parked our car and could literally walk to everything. It was called the Renaissance or something like that.

We walked around Inner Harbor for awhile to see the various attractions. We were near Hardrock Cafe, the Aquarium that we were going to the next day and all the 4th of July activities.

As we were taking pictures, some couple stopped us and offered to take a family photo. Luckily she didn't walk off with the camera but got a nice picture of us in our cheesy shirts in front of the ship.

Since we weren't really hungry for dinner (having had an extremely late lunch/early supper), we decided to treat the kids for ice cream at the mall that was attached to our hotel. They LOVE ice cream cones!

Here's my handsome hubby with his diet coke. :)

And our beautiful baby, in his stroller. Love his blue eyes in this photo! And if I didn't mention it before, now's a good time to bring up the fact that the temperature had hit the triple digits. What a HOT, humid, muggy day in Baltimore! We were all sweating!

But, at 9:30 when the fireworks were to start, we ventured down to the inner harbor to see if we could find a spot to watch the sky light up with loud bangs and beautiful colors. We had seen all sorts of places charging an arm and a leg for the "best view." We thought afterward that we had the best view, but air conditioning might have been worth something.

 

Ryan was not happy (it was also way after his bedtime), so we took turns holding him. Joshua, on the other hand, LOVED the fireworks over the water! They were beautiful. They started with a LOUD cannon shot from the boat and then it was like the typical "grand finale" throughout the entire time there. But, there was no finale then - it ended with another canon shot and they were done after about an hour.

Caleb begged to get into the stroller when Ryan got out and we let him. He was miserable. It was SO hot! He also did not appreciate all the noise from the loud fireworks. It wasn't until I saw this picture of him, though, that I realized how awful he must have felt. Doesn't he just look HOT?!?! That's how we all felt. But, the rest of us were appreciating the fireworks so we didn't seem to mind it as much.

Praise God our hotel was right there. And it was upscale enough to have what I'd call "bouncers" (or security) not letting anyone go in the doors to the A/C that didn't have their room keys out. When we got in, there was a HUGE line for the elevators. But, it kept moving (thankfully) and eventually we got up to our room. Here's a contrasting picture of Caleb - then happy - when we first checked into the hotel.

And while the hotel was extremely nice, we discovered that the air conditioning in our room didn't work well. I thought maybe it was just because it was so hot outside that it couldn't keep up with cooling off the room. But, in talking with other folks the next day, it was just our problem. We were hot that night, but not unbearably so - it just wasn't as frigid as we like our A/C at home.

The kids were all exhausted from a long day, but it still took Ryan a little while to adjust to the pack 'n play vs. his crib at home. Eventually, though, he laid down and passed out. We did, too! Happy 4th of July!