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I brought a laptop on this trip so I could cull, edit, and publish photos while still traveling. I’m using Adobe Lightroom Classic as my main photo repository, especially for pictures I take with my Panasonic FZ1000M2, but photos I take with my iPhone wind up going into Apple Photos.

I want to be able to back up my photos even while I’m traveling. Photos I take on the iPhone go into the Apple cloud and are, probably, automatically download into Photos at home and then backed up by Time Machine and Backblaze. I say “probably” because I have been running into problems with getting those same photos onto the laptop I brought with me – it stops downloading for no reason that I can figure out.

In desperation, I told Apple Photos to “repair” the photos library on the laptop; that took a while, and then it said it was going to download all of my photos from iCloud. I hoped it would do checksums on the laptop and on the server and only download missing or damaged photos, but that doesn’t seem to be the case – it wanted to download every photo. And it kept stopping and starting.

After much fiddling, I discovered that Photos seemed to stop downloading if it wasn’t the foreground application (the one in the menu bar). I also discovered that I could monitor the progress of the download by looking at the Pictures/Photos Library.photoslibrary/resources/cpl/cloudsync.index directory (Apple Photos is not very generous in its progress reporting).

Fortunately, we were docked at the DC Wharf and they had high-speed public wifi which I could use as long as I put the laptop on our balcony – I was able to complete the repair while we were in DC.

Today, though, the download has stopped again; rebooting hasn’t helped, and I can’t figure out what the hangup is. My iPad shows all of the photos I’ve taken. I’m very confused.

We sailed from Washington to Cambridge, Maryland overnight; Cambridge is an Eastern Shore town with a long history. We docked at the Long Wharf on the Choptank River; the town welcomed us by sending the Town Crier to visit us at breakfast.

There had been a lighthouse on the Choptank River for a very long time; it’s no longer in use, but it’s been restored as a tourist attraction, just a two-minute walk from our ship.

They’ve done a lot of work on the lighthouse, including adding a compass rose on the main floor. It was a nice visit; if there had been a volunteer there, I might have bought a souvenir.

Our ship took advantage of being in Cambridge; we saw one of the deckhands taking out the used glass bottles to the recycling depot. It was an impressive load, but I didn’t take a photo. They delivered a lot of food, too, as well as refueling us.

We walked up High Street to the center of town. We visited Christ Episcopal Church on our way; the current building dates to 1883, but the adjacent graveyard has burials going back to the 18th Century.

I considered having lunch at the Provident State Bank (now Fat Ricky’s), but we decided on Salmon Tikka Kebab at Bombay Social; it was good, and a change from the cuisine on the ship.

After lunch, we went back to the ship to regroup and prepare for our afternoon excursion to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park.

Our guide, Susan Meredith, had deep roots in this area; she and her husband have restored the Bucktown Village Store where Harriet Tubman first fought against slavery by defying an order from an overseer who wanted to recapture an escaping slave.

Susan and her family live in a 1790 house next to the Bucktown Store. The bricked-in area is where they have two fireplaces to heat the house.

After dinner, we were treated to a performance by the Eastport Oyster Boys, singing and playing local music on guitar, banjo, hammered dulcimer, and fiddle – not bad for only two guys!