Sunday, July 28, 2013

87) Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historic Park

Visited Monday, July 22nd, 2013; Wednesday, July 24th, 2013; Friday, July 26th, 2013-Saturday, July 27th, 2013

We actually passed one of the many C&O Canal sites maintained by the NPS back in 2011, near Antietam, but didn't have time to stop.  Then this past week we kept hitting the canal, before we finally got to see the visitor center for real on the 27th.

On the 22nd, at Harpers Ferry, we saw the canal bed; dry, which is an odd state to find a canal in my experience.

On the 24th, on the way back from Frostburg, we passed by and tried to stop at the Hancock visitor center - only to discover it closed.

On the 26th, while in D.C., we saw the lock house for the Washington Canal extension to the C&O canal.

Finally, on the 27th, we visited the Brunswick visitor center.  They had two videos; a Charles Kuralt On The Road show, which compared the speed on the canal to that of the concordes taking off nearby today, and a silent movie from 1917 showing the canal in use, which was spectacular.  It's a small site, but a very nice one, and on the floors above (at a charge) there's a nice old lodge building redone as a local history museum _and_ a miniature railroad recreation of the path from Brunswick to D.C. on the B&O.

One could spend a _long_ time exploring the canal.

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