We needed a break on Saturday, so we drove to Baltimore to visit the American Visionary Art Museum. We had not been to this unique and wonderful museum for years.

We needed lunch before our visit, didn’t want to battle downtown or Inner Harbor Baltimore, so drove a little south and wound up just outside the city line in Brooklyn Park, Maryland.

While wandering around looking for a decent place to eat, we were reminded not to be totally distracted by the war in the Middle East.

We found a Salvadoran-Mexican restaurant, Les Esperanza. It’s a fairly large, and remarkably clean restaurant that was almost entirely filled with family groups. I counted more than 80 customers, and they all looked Hispanic. I asked the waiter if we were the first non-Hispanics that he had ever served. He laughed, and said, “Oh, no. We get 4 or 5 every day.” The food was very good.

The Visionary Art Museum specializes in what Wikipedia calls “outsider art”. You have not heard of the artists, and they include folk artists, artists who learned their craft in prison, in hospitals, in orphanages, in mental institutions, and in concentration camps. The signage tells you a lot about the artists’ unique backgrounds, and often equally unique world views. For the most part, the quality of the art is first class.

And in addition to wall art and sculpture, there is a large model of the Lusitania. Anything unique about this model, other than its size? Yes, it is made entirely of 194,000 toothpicks.

After the museum, we strolled around Federal  Hill Park, with its high-up views of the city.

And then, we came home, but went out again, to see our old friends, Little Red and the Renegades, playing in Silver Spring.

Then, as the not young crowd thinned out by 10 p.m., we slowly drove home.