Maryland   
Old Line State

Motto: Manly Deeds, Womanly Words

Hotels     Airlines    Rental Cars

Captial City: Annapolis
{State bird, Baltimore oriole}  {State flower, black-eyed Susan}
{State tree, white oak}

Cheif Industry:
 chickens, greenhouse and nursery products,
dairy goods, corn, and soybeans, Coal, Fishing.

Chesapeake Bay Baltimore is one of the country's leading ports.

Maryland's largest city is the busy port of Baltimore , a quirky and engaging metropolis with a revitalized urban waterfront, thriving cultural scene and eclectic neighborhoods that characterize its diverse residents. Western Maryland stretches over a hundred miles to the Appalachian foothills, its rolling farmlands noteworthy chiefly for the Civil War battlefield at Antietam . Just twenty miles south of Baltimore, along the Chesapeake Bay, picturesque Annapolis has served as Maryland's capital since 1694. Some of the state's most worthwhile destinations, from the pretty fishing and yachting town of St Michaels to the untouched wilderness of Assateague Island

BALTIMORE is among the more enjoyable stops on the east coast, and its closely knit neighborhoods and historic quarters provide an engaging backdrop to many diverse attractions, especially those along its celebrated waterfront , like the Inner Harbor's National Aquarium and the Pier 6 Concert Pavilion and Power Plant entertainment complex. The city also boasts top-rated museums , like the Walters Art Museum and the child-oriented, interactive Port Discovery, which cover everything from fine arts through black history to urban archeology. That Baltimore has been home to such diverse figures as writers Edgar Allan Poe and Anne Tyler and civil rights activists Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall goes some way towards explaining its sometimes bizarrely varied character, but it's still hard to pin down exactly what makes it such an engaging city to visit, and to live in.

Maryland's compelling eastern shore occupies over half of the broad Delmarva  Delaware, Maryland, V irgini a  peninsula that protects the Chesapeake from the open Atlantic. Its miles of back roads are perfectly suited to aimless exploration and sudden discovery of such sights as the odd wooden farmhouse or tobacco barn marooned in the middle of a field, or an old sailboat tied up at an apparently decrepit dock that springs to life when the fishing craft return. The US-50 bridge/tunnel, built across the Chesapeake Bay in the early 1960s, may have made the eastern shore more accessible, but it hasn't affected its air of somnolence. Branching off from US-50 as it races down to the beach resort of Ocean City , quiet country lanes lead to two-hundred-year-old waterfront towns like Chestertown, St Michaels and Oxford .

While Baltimore has grown into the state's largest and busiest city, Annapolis , Maryland's colonial and current capital, has changed little in size and outward appearance. Before the US broke free from English rule, this was considered to be one of the most genteel and attractive colonial centers, and though its time-worn streets are now usually crowded, Annapolis is still among the more engaging small US cities. Its once-vital Chesapeake Bay waterfront now has little of the feel of colonial maritime life, but the real attractions of Annapolis, among its narrow streets, include fine homes, the Beaux Arts campus of the US Naval Academy, and the beautiful state capitol. If you like the look of Annapolis, and want to get a better feel for the Chesapeake Bay region away from the crowds, head south to places like St Mary's City - the first capital of Maryland, completely reconstructed in the 1960s - or Solomons Island , one of many small Chesapeake Bay towns that seem not to have changed for decades.

Stretched between West Virginia and the razor-straight Pennsylvania border, western Maryland ranges for some two hundred miles east to west, but is in places well under five miles across. In general, the further west you go, the more mountainous and backwoodsy the feel, quite similar to Maryland's Appalachian neighbors.

Though the countryside is very pretty and great for hiking and camping, specific points of interest are few. Apart from the Civil War battlefield at Antietam , west of the only sizeable town, Frederick , the best reason to come to this part of the state is to cycle or hike the footpath of the restored old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal , which winds along the Maryland side of the Potomac River from Washington DC for over 180 miles to Cumberland in the western mountains. Even further west is the state's largest freshwater lake, Deep Creek Lake , popular with watersports enthusiasts, which has more than 70,000 acres of public parks and forests surrounding it - some of which makes smooth cross-country skiing during the winter.