Maryland is in the Mid Atlantic region of the United States, bordering Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia to the south and west, Pennsylvania to the north, and Delaware to the east.
 Maryland has a small but irregular area, it ranges from the busy urban center of Baltimore to Appalachian hill country and the quaint fishing villages of the Chesapeake Bay. Once one of the world's most important fishing areas, the Chesapeake has recently been brought back from the brink disaster from pollution and over fishing. Maryland's oyster stocks are a thing of the past, but delicious soft-shell blue crabs are very plentiful.
Maryland has a great variety of topography that ranges from sandy dunes dotted with seagrass in the east, to low marshlands teeming with water snakes and large bald cypress near the bay, to gently rolling hills of oak forest in the Piedmont Region, and mountain pine groves in the west.
Maryland has some interesting historic sites. During the War of 1812 there was a last-ditch maneuver by the British military to take back the colonies, in which they burned down much of Washington DC. They wanted to destroy the shipyards at Baltimore. The British forces lost, and were held off by a small fort at the harbor's mouth; the fort's resistance inspired an onlooker, Francis Scott Key, to write the words to The Star-Spangled Banner.
Western Maryland runs a hundred miles to the Appalachian foothills, and has beautiful rolling farmlands.Ttwenty miles south of Baltimore, along the Chesapeake Bay, picturesque Annapolis has served as Maryland's capital since 1694. Maryland's most interesting destinations, from the quaint fishing and yachting town of St Michaels to the untouched wilderness of Assateague Island, are across the Chesapeake Bay on the eastern shore.
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