In Baltimore, dating past your own block.

You drift from Egyptian mummies to medieval armor to a case of Fabergé eggs without ever agreeing on an itinerary, and what someone stops in front of tells you more about them than an hour of questions would. Nothing is ticketed, which matters when one of you drove in from the other side of the city: leaving after one wing costs nobody anything.

You walk in without paying, and the galleries are quiet enough to hear each other — it works as the whole afternoon or as the first hour of a longer evening.

Walk in and people react out loud — five tiers of cast-iron balconies rising toward a skylight will do that — which hands two strangers a shared moment before either has said anything clever. Drop-in visitors stay on the ground floor, so it is a short stop by design: an opening move before a drink on Charles Street rather than the whole evening.

A twenty-minute stop rather than a whole evening: nothing to pay, central enough that neither of you drove the whole way, and worth checking that it is open to visitors before you plan around it.

General admission costs nothing and two sculpture gardens sit right outside, so you can move between cool galleries and open lawn as the conversation asks for it, with no ticket keeping you there out of obligation. The Matisse rooms and the rotunda named for John Waters sit a few minutes apart, which gives two people who have just met plenty to disagree about.

Entry costs nothing, weekends work best when the workweek has gone to the commute, and there is a patio restaurant on site if neither of you wants to get back in the car.

The stairs are steep enough to end the small talk for a minute, and then the whole downtown skyline opens up across the water — the view every postcard of this city uses, and nobody charges you to look at it. It is also the rare spot where you can take in both sides of the harbor at once, which helps when you are explaining where you live and how rarely you leave it.

Free and outdoors, at its best in the hour before sunset; street parking here is residential permit territory, so walking in or getting dropped off saves an argument.

Nobody wants to open a first date by asking what the other person eats, and a hall full of independent stalls makes the question moot — you each order whatever you want and carry it back to the same table. It stays quiet enough to actually hear each other, which the bars two blocks over do not, and it works on a weeknight when one of you walked over straight from the train.

Walk in, order separately, and leave after one round if it is not going anywhere — nothing to pay at the door, and far calmer on a weeknight than on a Saturday.

Container ships slide past close enough to read the lettering on the hull, and the seawall loop around the point is flat the whole way, so you walk side by side instead of facing each other across a table. The loop takes about half an hour, which sets the length of the meeting for you — long enough to know, short enough that neither of you has lost the evening.

The grounds, the parking and the seawall trail are free, a weekday evening out here is genuinely quiet, and Locust Point is a dead-end peninsula, so plan on driving.

For anyone living east of downtown, this is the meeting place nobody has to concede — the shared backyard for Canton, Highlandtown and Butchers Hill, with a boat lake, dog walkers and a pickup soccer game running somewhere. Climbing to the pagoda turns an aimless walk into a walk with a destination, which is roughly what a first meeting needs.

Costs nothing and is easy to reach, best on a weekend afternoon, with the pagoda climb seasonal and the coffee shops on the far side an obvious next stop.

In February, when the alternative is another dark bar, a restored Victorian palm house is the better idea: connected greenhouses running desert to tropical to orchid, warm and bright in a month when the city outside offers neither. The loop is short by design, so a first meeting here ends before it drags, and the reservoir walk outside is right there if you both want it to run longer.

Donations welcome rather than an admission line, hard to beat in the cold months, and the parking inside Druid Hill Park takes the guesswork out of arriving.

The path hugs the water past marinas, working tugboats and the Domino Sugars sign, and because it runs from Canton straight into Fells Point, it quietly settles the whose-neighborhood question by putting you in both. Walking builds in its own pauses — you stop to watch a boat instead of reaching for another question — and there is a way off the path every block, so either person can call it a night without making a scene.

Public and open air, flat and largely step-free, with nothing to pay; walk it westward so you finish near Fells Point if you both want to keep going.