Those of us who are experts in urban classification terminology know that the area that surrounds Baltimore and our nation’s capitol is technically called the Washington-Baltimore-Arlington, DC-MD-VA-WV-PA Combined Statistical Area. (It’s true, look it up.) Good god, I can’t be repeatedly typing that ridiculously long name here. I’d be writing all day and I’d get painful cramps in my fingers. For the purposes of this post, I’m just going to call it the Baltimore-DC Corridor.

The Baltimore-DC Corridor is where one of our Cycle-365 colleagues lives, and, surprisingly enough, MY Town has a robust community of immigrants from the Baltimore-DC Corridor. (Okay, that does it. Even that abbreviated term is starting to irritate the nerves in my fingers. Hereinafter, I am going to use the even more abbreviated B.D.C.C. Wait! To heck with those periods . . . I’m going to shorten it even more to just BDCC.

Today I am going to lead a guided tour of Minnesota’s BDCC. Thanks to its many grand monuments, its museums, its government buildings, its Chesapeake-like bay on Lake Rebecca, and its famous crab cakes, our local BDCC gets more tourists than all of the other neighborhoods I’ve featured here combined.

So, please put on your face masks, maintain a six-foot distance from your fellow tour takers, be careful as we breeze our bikes right through stop signs, and follow me down to the BDCC. Most importantly, feel free to interrupt my presentation at any time with any questions that come to mind. Thank you. Now lets get this tour underway.

I know it’s probably a little early, but I think we should stop for lunch. Maybe we can find a restaurant that serves crab cakes. That reminds me of a story.

For years I had been hearing about the great Chesapeake Bay crab cakes that Baltimore is so famous for. I love trying uniquely special regional cuisine and I had dreamed about trying a crab cake for years and years. Finally, when I drove my dad to Baltimore last year so he could attend the funeral of his childhood best friend, I saw my opportunity. At the post-funeral reception, I spoke to the blind woman who sat next to us at the church. When she learned my dad and I came all the way from Iowa and Minnesota, respectively, she asked if we had tried any crab cakes yet. I said “no” and asked if she had any recommendations as to where we could find the very best. She confidently named three places we should try. One of them was on the south side of town not too far from where we were staying. Oh man, my mouth was drooling.

Thank you for listening to my story from the past, folks. I hope you enjoy your crab cakes here at The Lock & Dam Restaurant . . . if they even have them on the menu. As for me, I think I’ll just order a deep fried crappie fillet.

Are you done eating? Great! Let’s ride our bikes from MY Town’s Baltimore over to MY Town’s Washington D.C.

You’ve been a great tour group so far. There are other great monuments coming up, but I should warn you that if I see a “collection” of some kind, I might have to make an unscheduled stop. Hey, speak of the devil, there’s one now.

Stay with me people. Don’t be gawking at the tractor tires ‘cuz we’ve got a lot more to cover.

I’m glad you enjoyed the national zoo. I don’t like zoos myself. I feel very sorry for animals in enclosed areas. Now let’s move on to another seriously enclosed area.

That concludes our tour of Minnesota’s BDCC. I thank you for your participation and I hope to see you on my last few Cycle365 tours. I think that includes tours of Minnesota’s Oregon and Coastal California and Singapore.

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[Somehow, a bunch of pictures from my family trip to Washington D.C. in 2014 got intermixed with my pictures from today’s tour of Minnesota’s Washington D.C. I can’t explain the reason, but I suspect it was interference from the right-wing media.]