My brother Alan and I had been talking about me coming down for a visit to his home in Towson, MD for about a year. For some reason, I never could commit - usually because of work. It finally got to the point this week where I just made reservations on Southwest and went down! How great is that!

Wednesday was a miserable rainy day with heavy fog to boot. I went into work but left around noon because I just knew the roads would be busy and wet, and flying out of Manchester was two hours from Portland, ME. Good thing I did leave around then because it was slow going in many places. That worked out fine because though I was running a little late, the plane was 40 minutes late taking off.

But the heat almost took my breath away when I got off the plane: it was over 100 degrees and the humidity was awful. Fortunately, it's only about a half hour drive from BWI to Towson and Alan and I had a nice chat on the way up.

One of my stated goals in coming down was to have Alan reaquaint me with the fine art of Southern Porch Sitting, which he had taught me many years before. We got right down to it despite the heat of the early evening.

It was Alan's night to cook and he had already prepared the dinner - an amazing Chicken Chasseur with which we enjoyed a very smooth German Reisling wine.

He and I stayed out very late on the porch talking and listening to the circidas sing, and to the breeze - which had finally pushed in - rustle through the leaves of all of the surrounding trees.

Though it was a late night, I got up around 8:30 and met Alan in the kitchen for breakfast and one of his speciality coffees; today it was Guatamalian Antigua, and what a terrific cup of coffee that was! My coffee experience is pretty limited; I'm more knowledgable about wine, but Alan is as much a coffee aficionado as I am with wine. Abbie snapped this picture of us standing on the steps of the site of the Southern Porch Sitting event.

And here's Alan and Abbie together on the back porch steps. Alan had an appointment late morning and into the early afternoon and so the plan was when he got back that we'd take a trip down to Baltimore's Inner Harbor district. I just love that whole area and was really looking forward to seeing it. And the heat - though in the nineties - was less humid so we felt we could press on with it.

After Alan left for his appointment, I grabbed a big glass of water and headed out onto the porch. But, the longer I sat on the porch and read (rereading The First Five Pages for about the fourth time now; it's a book on writing style and form that I find really helpful) the worse the sky began to look.

At one point after checking email, I went to weather.com and there was a massive storm heading toward the coast. It was so bad that warnings were posted to take cover when it approached. It just started to sprinkle when Alan got home but he was certain that it would all blow over fairly quickly.

Nope. It got worse, and worse, and worse. The wind blew in ferocious blasts sending torrents of rain pouring straight down against the steaming pavement, sometimes so hard that the view of the distant trees was obscured. That was a hard rain. No way would we be going to the Inner Harbor today!

While sitting out on the porch and watching all of this - and sipping a little wine - we decided that we should cook a Portuguese dinner from the speciality cookbook that Alan had - our great-great-great grandfather was from the Azores and he had been experimenting with some of the dishes. So, we went in and selected one of the recipies - Pot Roast Azorean-style - that not only sounded great, but for which we had almost all the ingredients for on hand!

The only thing we lacked was some hot red peppers for the sauce. Who would figure that a Portuguese dinner would call for hot red peppers? But Portuguese cooking is really an amalgamation of many middle eastern cultures as well as Greek and Spanish, so there it was and we needed it. The storm abated briefly and so we scooted out to a local market. No luck there so Alan took us up to a major speciality store - Wegmans - where we found, get this: hot red Thai Chili Peppers. Ok... I told him I'd do most of the cooking if he'd do prep work and thus if the sauce was too hot he could lay it all off on me. He thought that a great idea and we purchased the aforesaid hot red Thai Chili Peppers...

We officially swung into full cooking gear around 5:30 with the opening of what turned out to be a marvelous Bardalino and culminated in an even more marvelous dinner feast around 7:30.

After that, Abbie went in to watch some tv and Alan and I were back out on the porch. There was a marvelous cool breeze blowing and the wet smell from the storm was all around us. It was another late night, but what a night it had been!

Coffee Friday morning was a special Italian blend: Lavazza. Though smooth and good in it's own right, I could recognize the difference in quality and taste from Thursday's Guatamalian Antigua. I think I got spoiled Thursday...

One of Alan's son's Scott, an attorney and CEO of a specialty social services organization came by for lunch. It was great to see him as it had been years and years and years since the last time. After he left, Alan and I did more Southern Porch Sitting and a lot more discussing of the structural aspects of the novel I had written. I am waiting for about a week of open time to do the final edits on it before calling it complete. Alan has been a tremendous asset to me as not only a sounding borad for the development of the project but also keeping my ass out of technical quicksand. Though I seem to be fairly competent all around, there have been time where he has laid the wood right to me.

The origianl plan for dinner was all of us going up to Wegmans super deli and buffet, but Abbie was beat on her feet; she had left early that morning to go up to Amish country with friends and they had really been all over. She suggested that Alan take me to the Orchard Market Cafe which has Persian food. Regardless of my limited previous experiences with middle eastern food, Alan noted that Persian/Iranian food was much lighter and had wonderful sauces. Well, I was all excited to give it a try. It turned out to be not only such a wonderful meal but dining experience itself. It's just a little place tucked way back off the road in a small mall, but man! what a great meal that was! Oh, and we killed a bottle of some kind of white Portuguese wine that we had bought at a nearby liquor store as the cafe is BYOB. Couldn't find an Iranian wine so: Portuguese. Why not?

This is Alan at the Canton Docks area by the Korean War Memorial Park in Canton, MD just Noth of the Inner Harbor. We had decided to park there and catch the water taxi back into the Inner Harbor because trying to find a parking spot anywhere near there on a Saturday morning in full tourist season would have been maddness.

Here's a crummy shot from the Water Taxi as it makes it's way along the harbor.

Here we are coming into one of the stops. There was a For Sale sign on one of the condos you see to the right, though the unit at the end. The boat driver said it was going for 4.3 million... nice... He also pointed out the damage that last years storm had done. Actually, the entire Inner Harbor area had been devestated by a 12 foot tidal surge.

Just a shot across the harbor lane to show how really huge this area is. It's really big...

This is the square just off the Fells Landing stop for the Water Taxi. When you come from Canton, you have to transfer here onto another boat to get up to the Inner Harbor proper. We were just enjoying the sun and the warm weather so were in no real hurry to get anywhere or do anything. So, we wanedered around the square for a little while and then caught the next taxi to the Inner Harbor.

Coming into the Inner Harbor.

Approaching the basin area.

A view of one of the ships you can tour.

This was a privat yacht docked along the main walkway of the Inner Harbor.

Ah, yes... and here I am feeling way to fine and looking way too good for my height. I think...

This shot - and the next one - were taken about half way down from the tip of the Inner Harbor out to the Science Museum at the other end of the promenade. This looks to the left toward the tip.

And this looks about straight out across the Inner Harbor. The previous picture of me standing would be sweeping the camera just a little further to the right. What's interesting is that though you don't see many people in these pictures - there were literally thousands. I mean, it was wall to wall humanity. And to top it off - so many of them were from, get this: Boston! Yup! The Sox were playing the Baltimore Orioles that afternoon and it was tough not to see someone without a Sox shirt or bag. You wouldn't see any Orioles shirts because the locals aren't stupid enough to come down to this area in this heat and have to deal with all these throngs of people. It was so packed and busy that we couldn't find an open spot at any of the coupld of bars that we checked out. To hell with that!

Time to head for somewhere quiet to get my Summer Celebration Pina Colada. When we got back to the Fells, we only had to wait about 10 minutes to catch a Water Taxi out to Canton, and from there we just walked over to the Bay Cafe just off Boston Street and sat at the bar and relaxed. And I got my damn Summer Celebration pina Colada!

Here's Alan coming up the backyard slope after parking the car from our adventure. We had decided that we had had so much fun cooking Portuguese Thursday night that we'd do it again. Before heading out on our adventure, I had selected a Shrimp Curry recipe that looked just great. While we were gone, Abbie went to the store and got about 2 pounds of large shrimp.

We had a bottle of some red Portuguese wine that we popped open and started in on as Abbie and Alan devained the shrimp. Fortunately, the breeze had come up and cooled things down really nicely so we could have the doors and windows open to blow off the stink.

While they did that, I started in on making the curry sauce and the broth that we would be fixing the rice in. And it came out so good I just can't believe it! I have to get Alan to copy that recipe and send it to me because that's got to be done again and again! And we did finish that bottle of wine off as well! What a grand evening it was.

To top it off, we watched the movie "Sweet Land" that they had gotten the other day from Netflix and it was pretty good. And though we did go back out for a final stint of Southern Porch Sitting after the movie so we could have some of the cake that Abbie had bought at the Amish store she had gone to, we did call it an early evening as I had to be at the airport by 7:00am for my flight out.

It was sad to have to leave, but what a joyous time I had. And that's what it's all really about...