Starting in 2012 Baltimore started a big celebration featuring a lot of ships in our harbors and performances by the Blue Angels. Back then it was for the anniversary of the War of 1812. Two years later they did it again in 2014 for the end of the War of 1812. Now they’ve decided it was such a great success as part of the War of 1812 anniversary that they’re going to keep doing it every 2 years but branded as Maryland Fleet Week.

We went to it back in 2012 and 2014 and enjoyed it so we decided we go again this year. Happily we had a beautiful weather this weekend, so it as a great day to be outdoors. Since I go to church in Federal Hill, which is the neighborhood just south of the Inner Harbor where the ships were, my husband who normally doesn’t go accompanied me to church so that we could just stay parked there and walk over the festivities.

We started by grabbing lunch in the little beer garden they had set up. It actually had a nice selection of food by local restaurants and some local food trucks. We wound up splitting a pizza cooked in a mobile brick wood fired oven, which I thought was interesting. Usually at these things when live bands play I hate the music and it’s too loud, but for the time we were there it was the perfect volume and it was a bluegrass band, so I was happy.

There were not nearly as many ships this time as there had been in the past. The one docked in the Inner Harbor had a line a mile long when we walked by so we by-passed it completely. We had thought about walking over to the one in Fells Point, but had seen on the news that it got called away to do whatever it actually is in service for so had to leave early. We wound up walking over to Pier 5 where the USS Carson City was docked. It’s a fairly new Navy ship that looks sort of like a giant aluminum catamaran. It took longer than I thought to go through the ship, but it mostly worked out since we had a lot of time before the Blue Angels. We had to go through security first and then had to wait in a long line to get on the ship. They actually did guided tours and by the time we finally got off I was ready to be done. Our tour guide was chatty and several people in our group kept asking questions. We got by-passed by two other groups in areas where multiple groups could gather and got told to hurry up and move along in at least three places where only one group could be at a time. I was definitely getting a little anxious by the time we got off.

Because we were on the ship we missed most of the flying by whatever fighter jets were flying early in the afternoon, but I did see some crazy dives that were making me nauseous just watching them. Our main goal of the outing was to see the Blue Angels. We sat on the side of Federal Hill to watch them in a nice shady area on the grass. It turns out there was a tree in our way for some of it, but for the most part we had a pretty good view. It was amazing to watch as always. I honestly have no idea how they do that. There were definitely a few points where I almost wanted to cover my eyes because I was afraid they were going to run into each other. Obviously they didn’t or you would have heard about it all over the news. As always it was an amazing sight to see (and hear).