nick: “so i just went online to read about your trip, but i don’t have the three hours i’d need to read it.”
sorry people with short attention spans, but i’m only through the first two days. there are still two and a half more days to cover! but first, a random story about how sometimes the most absurd things happen to me.
so i go to the grocery store last night, do all my shopping, walk out to the car, put all my groceries in the trunk, close the trunk, and go to open the driver’s door. i look down and notice that my car key is bent. as i bring it closer to my face for further inspection, the key breaks in half. hmm. well, crap. i have no way to unlock my car door or start the engine, and half my groceries are thawing in the trunk. i call debbie. no answer. i call jason. no answer. i think about who else lives close to me, and finally call ron, who is about to sit down to dinner. sigh.
but ron and buzz were nice enough to hop in the car, drive to kroger, pick me up, drive me to my apartment complex (which is less than a mile away–i would have just walked if not for the thawing groceries) so i could get the spare car key, and drive me back to kroger so i could get into the car and drive home. crazy.
the strangest thing is that this has happened to me before! my key broke once while i was down at carter’s house, resulting in a trip all the way up to tech and back in order to get into my car. obviously this particular nissan key design sucks, as it’s broken in the same place (the thinnest spot) both times.
anyway.
friday (6/13): drive to boston, first visit to fenway, and blueberry beer
highlight(s): experiencing a rain delay; getting a bullpen ball;
talking to octavio dotel; trading witty remarks with a cool person
amusing moment: debating whether to drive through rhode island or not
we woke up to a lovely morning in new york, with cool weather thanks to the previous night’s torrential rain. alas, it was time to leave. after a stop at starbucks and some choose-your-bagel place, we loaded all our stuff into the white minivan we rented for the drive to boston. chris and his chair took the back seat, jeremy and betsy settled into the middle, edgar drove, and i was the navigator. (for the record, i would like to just point out that no matter what the other four may say, i am an excellent navigator.)
it took us two freaking hours to get out of new york. not knowing the “back” ways meant that we were forced to simply go with what looked easiest, which meant driving up 8th avenue past central park and into harlem, crossing over into the bronx, and taking the cross-bronx expressway to eventually reach i-95. traffic was stop-and-go practically the whole way, even once we got onto 95. by the time we reached new haven, connecticut, it was time for a choice. betsy and i voted to stay on i-95 and come into boston from the south, if for no other reason than we wanted to say we’d been in rhode island. the boys, on the other hand, voted to take the 91-84-mass pike through hartford and into boston from the west. somehow the boys decided that their 3 votes outweighed our 2 (despite my argument that betsy and i should each count as 2 votes), and so i can’t add rhode island to my list of states. i suppose i’m not missing much.
we reached boston and got back on 95 around the city and got to chris’s friend matt’s house (our “hotel” for the weekend, in the suburb of wakefield) around 5. in rapid succession, we dropped off our bags, picked up ron from the t-stop (he flew in just for the boston part of the trip), dropped ron’s things off, and headed into the city. chris and i had tickets to the evening game, while the others were just going to hang out in the city. we successfully reached the stadium and met up with chris’s friends rebecca, luis, and costa…but there was a problem. rain.
not hard rain, just constant drizzle. mist. nothing big, but enough to delay the game. it was cold, and wet, but it somehow turned out to be fun anyway. i’ve never been in a rain delay since the stadium here in houston has a roof, so it somehow felt appropriate to experience one. we sat in right field on the first row behind the astros bullpen, and drank beer, and laughed, and imagined what our intro song would be if we were coming up to bat. (happy birthday was luis’s choice, “just to confuse people.”)
after almost an hour, the grounds crew finally came out and started pulling up the tarp. there were cheers all around; we were going to see a ballgame! we watched the pitchers warmup in the bullpen, which was 4 feet away from our seats (more on that in a minute), and the game finally started around 8:30. the rain never stopped, in fact, it wasn’t raining any less at 8:30 than it had been at 7:00. ah well. the minor delay just meant i got to spend more time at fenway, which was a really cool park. it felt so small inside–i don’t know how they fit almost 35,000 people in there without a big upper deck like all the other parks in the league. the green monster was as imposing as i’d imagined (i wanted to go up to the top to take a peek out, but they wouldn’t let you up there without a ticket), but seemed to shrink a little later in the game when morgan ensberg slammed a ball over it. 😉
the astros lost, but the didn’t diminish the coolest part of being at the park on friday night, which was sitting by the bullpen. chris and i both got baseballs from the bullpen coach after talking to him and telling him we’d come from houston for the game (mine was the ball ricky stone was warming up with before he went in the game in the 4th inning). later, octavio dotel (an astros relief pitcher and one of the 6 that combined for the no-no on wednesday) apparently got bored sitting on the bench, because he came over and stood in the bullpen where we could see and talk to him. we congratulated him on his 4 strikeout inning and the no-hitter, and got him to sign our baseballs. later, chris even got him to take the ball over to billy wagner (the astros closer) for another autograph. i, on the other hand, am apparently not as cute or convincing as chris with his gimp advantage, as octavio wouldn’t do the same thing for me later. of course, that could have been because wagner was about to warm up.
watching wagner (and his 100-mph fastball) warm up in the bullpen from 4 feet away was awesome. but then he made me angry. the astros didn’t score in the top of the 9th and the game ended, and wagner came back to the bench to collect his things. he looked at the kid next to me, pointed at him, signed his ball, and then without so much as a glance at me or my baseball or anyone else, walked away. grr. billy, you dolt.
ah well. we left the game, met up with the others, and headed across the street to boston beer works, where they had blueberry beer. it actually had blueberries floating in it. i know, i know, it sounds really weird, but it was good. we had a grand old time there until the bar closed, at which point luis was nice enough to give us all a ride back to matt’s in his tiny car. betsy and i squeezed into the front seat, and we’re all probably lucky that i wasn’t more in the way of the stick shift or luis wouldn’t have been able to drive at all.
