I took a little detour today from work. I’m in Maryland for a meeting on technology innovation and wanted to see how well my phone would guide me on an outing for the day. So, I Googled A Day’s Outing on my phone and low and behold it looks great. I entered Potomac, MD as my starting location, asked for Antiques and said that I could drive 10 miles. The search found 4 antique shops for me. The map was a bit hard to see on our site, but it was easy to take the address and map it on Google.
And where did I end up? I found myself in the town of Kensington. I had never even heard of it before, but it was a quick and easy drive from where I was. The antique shop I was headed to was Acanthus Antiques. It has amazing furniture, but the treasures that struck me were jewelry, especially the charms. There were simple charms and then there were ones with pearls, others with rubies and one amazing charm with a house, fence and tree on it, and it was encrusted with gems and pearls. The old charms reminded me of ones on my mother’s bracelet. I just loved them.
The area in Kensington with Acanthus Antiques, Grant Antiques and La Belle Epoque is what I think of as an old warehouse district. When I turned on to the street I thought for a moment that I was in the wrong place. It took me a block or so to realize I was in the right place and that there were all sorts of shops around me. After the antique store, I popped into Marco Polo Treasures. This shop is part of an old loading dock and is really cool. There are accessories and furniture from Borneo and Bali, and the shop owner Deb Sagerholm was a delight to talk to.
All in all, my detour was fabulous. I took and hour and a half and it felt like so much more. It really is amazing what is right around the corner if you just look for it.
