The best-laid plans. . .

My hard drive with photos seems to have failed so I cannot post photos just yet (I DO have backups but not the time right now to dig them out).

I had the whole trip laid out. Every game planned. A long stay in a nice New York hotel over our 53^rd anniversary on the 12^th. All shot to hell by a broken water heater and a broken turn signal. Not to mention the riots in Baltimore—I can’t imagine what it was like for the ball players to play a game with NO spectators!—that put the kibosh on going to the Orioles’ game on May 2^nd. We going to try and leave the motorhome with Camping World in Kingston, NY, to be fixed and we’ll set off for Boston, NY, Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore by car and Marriott hotels. We had planned to stay in some hotels in the Northeast anyway, just not so many!

But, like the old saying that every cloud has a silver lining, we have adapted (nothing like mixing metaphors) and have tickets to the Red Sox on the 2^nd and it’s against the Yankees! What could be better than a Red Sox/Yankees game in Fenway Park?!

Since Atlanta and their VERY interesting game we have travelled almost 1000 miles in both pouring rain and beautiful sunshine. Fenway, however, is baseball mecca! What a stadium! And not just the stadium/field/park but the surrounding streets as well. They block off Yawkey Way so that it is inside the “secure” zone. There are peanuts, popcorn, hot dogs, musicians, entertainers, just about anything you can imagine that might be sold or looked at will be on Yawkey Way.

We had been warned about the small, old, wooden seats that would make us realize, after three or so hours—our son-in-law, Ken, said that most Red Sox/Yankees games go FOUR hours (but ours didn’t, only three hours)—that we’d been sitting on a very hard seat. It wasn’t a whole lot different than any other stadium we’ve been in—except Tampa! Now, THEY have small (very small!), hard seats; the worst stadium so far—we were so involved in the game by keeping score that we didn’t even notice that we’d been sitting for three hours on a hard seat. The Evil Empire (Yankees) beat the home team, playing to a sold-out stadium.

Cubby Bear outside Fenway Park

Don't worry, it'll fill up soon!

Party time on the street in front of Fenway, Yawkey Wat.

More entertainment of the baseball ilk.

Cubby inside Fenway.

I told you it would fill up!

ARod not hitting a home run.

We took the “T” (as in the old Kingston Trio song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Jw_v3F_Q0

“‘M.T.A.’, often called ‘The MTA Song’, is a 1949 song by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes. Known informally as ‘Charlie on the MTA’, the song's lyrics tell of a man named Charlie trapped on Boston's subway system, then known as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The song was originally recorded as a mayoral campaign song for Progressive Party candidate Walter A. O'Brien. A version of the song with the candidate's name changed became a 1959 hit when recorded and released by the Kingston Trio, an American folk group.
The song has become so entrenched in Boston lore that the Boston-area transit authority named its electronic card-based fare collection system the "CharlieCard" as a tribute to this song. The transit organization, now called the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), held a dedication ceremony for the card system in 2004 which featured a performance of the song by the Kingston Trio and then-governor Mitt Romney.”) which was an experience in itself!

As you may know, security at baseball stadiums has increased exponentially. Bag searches, no nail clippers (!), small pocket knives, virtually not metal (except we are allowed to bring in two large metal clipboards for our score sheets), water bottles, etc. It may be harder to get in a baseball park than to get on an airplane.

EXCEPT for the MBTA! You can walk across the tracks, access the cars, anything! without being searched. In some places you don’t even need a ticket to get on (but you’ll be fined if they check and you don’t have one), the whole station is open, no ticket gates, even. But god forbid you try to get in a baseball stadium with nail clippers!

Back to the game. At one point the night before ARod hit a home run to tie Willie Mays for fourth in number of home runs. The fan who caught it refused to negotiate with ARod’s representatives because, as one pundit put it, “Citizens of the Red Sox Nation do not negotiate with the Evil Empire [the hated Yankees].”

He didn’t hit a home run in our game and only had one hit in four at-bats. The Red Sox had a home run but it wasn’t enough to overcome the Evil Empire, who won 4 – 2. Too bad, no joy in Mudville today.

We’re off to Washington DC for a Nationals/Marlins (we’ve seen them both before even though we’ve only been to seven games so far. I think we’ll see the Nats five times and the Brewers five times in the upcoming 23 games.