After the Boys of Summer Have Gone

So where was I before the sun cooked my brain?  Ah, yes.  Summer's treats.  Let's get on with it then.

I think this summer may aptly be described as my Summer of Baseball.  As I began laying the plans of my exodus from DC, I put in a request with my brother, The Nuge, to fly out and help me make the drive west.  The Nuge was willing, under one condition: that I meet him in Boston to begin our drive.  He had seen DC a number of times, and wanted to go somewhere he'd never been before.  When he suggested this, it occurred to me that I had never been to Fenway Park.  I don't care much for the Red Sox, but I'm a big fan of visiting different baseball stadiums, and Fenway is a historic park.  So we agreed to catch a game while we were there.  Then I got to thinking, "There are a lot of parks along the way back to Denver.  We should visit those as well."  I ran the idea by The Nuge, and he liked it.  Fate gave a wink and a tip o' the cap, and made sure that all of the teams along the way were having home games on the days we planned to pass through their cities.  Then, having laid those plans, I thought, "You know, if I could just make it to a couple more, I will have visited every ballpark here in the Northeast."  So I made that my goal before leaving the east. 

On consecutive weekends in June, I spent the night in Chinatown at Dirty Harry's place so I could catch the 6:30 AM Chinatown bus to NYC.  The C-Town bus, for those not familiar, goes from DC's C-Town to NYC's C-Town, but also stops at Penn Station in NYC.  There are a number of companies that make the run, so your experience can be very different depending on which company you get your tickets with.  My first trip was to see Yankee Stadium, and when time came to depart, the driver gets on the bus and barks in broken English something to the effect of the restroom not flushing, so please don't throw the deuce or we'll all have to smell it the whole way to NYC.  Sir, I will hold it as long as I have to.  Thanks for the warning.

It was a day game, so the game finished around four in the afternoon.  My Chinese Chariot didn't depart for DC until seven, so I took a nice long stroll from Penn Station in midtown all the way down to Little Italy for some Gelato.  This may not seem extraordinary, and it's not on its face.  What made it special was that it happened to be the day of the NYC Pride Parade.  The parade had gone right down Broadway about an hour or two before I got there.  So the parade was long over, but the street was still all blocked off.  I was able to take my stroll right down the middle of Broadway, and I didn't even have to put on my leather daddy gear to do so.  It was a surreal feeling, one of those unexpected providential nods that make the times in between memorable.

The next weekend was the same drill, only instead of the Bronx, this time I took the Long Island Railroad out to Brooklyn for a Mets game at Citi Field.  It was a hot and muggy day, and I had no sunscreen.  But the stadium was great, probably one of my top five so far.  From my seats in the right field grandstands, I could watch the planes taking off from La Guardia airport.  And something I didn't even realize, it is right across the train tracks from the U.S. Open tennis stadium.  Had I known, I would have made the trip for an Open in prior years.  Oh well.  For the ride home, I had a nicer bus, but in the row behind me I had some ridiculous Jamaican woman preachifying to the man next to her the entire four-hour journey.  Can you imagine having to listen to Calypso from Pirates of the Caribbean jabbering nonsense for four hours after sitting in the sweltering sun all afternoon?  You can rationalize some pretty violent stuff in that condition.  My will held out, though.  Just barely.

I made one more trip to NYC before leaving the east coast.  Again, I took a C-Town bus, and this time stayed the night in a crummy little hostel on the upper west side a few blocks from Columbia University.  That night, I met with my trainer from my mission, whom I hadn't seen in nearly ten years, and who lives in the city working as a playwright.  Very talented guy, it was great to catch up with him.  We parted after dinner and I had nowhere to be until the next day.  So I wandered into Central Park to pass the time and stumbled upon the New York Opera giving a free performance in the park.  Again, an unexpected nod of fate.  The next morning I wandered Greenwich Village and Chinatown, hit up Magnolia to mack on some cupcakes, and then beat it out to Brighton Beach to meet an old Russian friend who had recently moved there.  Brighton Beach is a head trip.  Store signs are all in Russian.  It didn't even occur to me to speak to people in English.  It also happens to be an armpit, so if you ever get the chance to go, don't.

Upon returning from my final trip to the city, it was time to load my car and get outta Dodge.  I got it all in with room to spare, and pulled out of DC on Thursday morning around 11.  The Nuge's plane arrived Friday in Boston at five o'clock in the ay em.  So in the meantime, I drove to Syracuse, NY, to visit an old friend from Denver doing a grad program there.  After dinner, I drove through the night to arrive in Boston at 4:30 AM.  I napped in the cell phone waiting lot for about 20 minutes until The Nuge called, and then we were on our way.  We parked near Boston Commons on Charles Street around 5:30 and began our tour of the Freedom Trail, but came back for breakfast at a cafe there when we realized that none of the historical sites were open yet.  Thanks to our early start, we managed to see all of the Freedom Trail sites and still had time to drive out to Lexington and Concord to visit the Revolutionary War sites, as well as head up to Cambridge to wander around Harvard's campus a little.  In the afternoon, we went to see the Bunker Hill monument, but were so exhausted that we just fell down in the shade of a maple tree and slept for about an hour.  By then, it was time to get over to the game and start the baseball portion of the trip.  It's all travelogue-ish from here to Denver, and I'm assuming most everyone has been to a baseball game before, so I'll just give you the cities we visited and let the pics give a taste of our experiences.  From the Friday night game in Boston, we went to Pittsburgh, stopping at Penn State for lunch.  From the Saturday night game in Pittsburgh (with fireworks after the game!), we went to Cleveland and caught an Indians game the next day before departing for Chicago and a rendezvous with the Cubs at Wrigley Field on Monday night.  At that point, The Nuge had to get back to work, so we left for Denver straight from the Cubs game, arriving home around noon on Tuesday. 

And now to the pics:

The Concrete Mausoleum

Jeter takes a swing

Me with the Bleacher Creatures

Somewhere in my top 5 favorite stadiums so far.

Posing so easy, a caveman can do it

Flatiron building down Broadway

It's the 21st century and Bostonians are still sitting on wooden seats

The Green Monster

I do love festivals.  This one may not be my scene, though.

The Nuge on a bronze donkey.  This has GOT to be in Revelations somewhere

Pittsburgh:  Definitely my favorite so far.

The view just before the fireworks

Fireworks on the one night we happened to be in town??

Anointed by the hand of Roberto Alomar

Cuban Pete at the Indians game

Gotta admit, the war drum was a pretty fun feature of Jacob Field.

Was going for a shot of the robot street performer, but got a two-fer with this Cleveland fashionista

At Notre Dame, me and Touchdown Jesus

Knowing nothing about Chicago, we opted for the full-blown tourist experience of a double decker bus.

The Nuge at Wrigley.  Great surrounding neighborhood.

Very intimate feeling park.  Much better than Fenway.

Once back in Denver, I caught a Rockies game (where they scored 12 runs in one inning!), and since arriving in AZ, I've been to three D-backs games (first time in a dome).  For the scorecard, I've been to eleven parks this year:  DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NY Yankees, NY Mets, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, and Arizona.  I only missed Toronto in the northeast.  One day, Blue Jays, we'll party. 

The Sun God Will Not Be Mocked

Icarus flew low
to beat the sun's heat.  But in
Phoenix, Ra laughs last.

I Can Haz Grate Summer?

Man, some summers are just too spectacular to let go without a wrap-up.  And this summer...oh boy.  I almost hesitate to write about it because I don't want to sound like I'm bragging.  But it was a good one by any standard.  Even if you consider that I was homeless and sleeping on people's floors (and once in my car) from May through most of July, it was a damn fine summer.  I see the living situation as a testament of the amazing friends I have to let me impose on them.

I suppose a season this great doesn't happen without a decent lead in, so let me set the stage:

I had been applying for a job with the government, and as often happens with the government hiring process, it was taking FOREVER.  So as a backup plan, I had researched MBA programs and spent the winter and early spring applying to those programs.  At about the same time, my family-tight friend and roommate of three years, Mzungu, decided to take a position in Kenya and announced he would be leaving when our lease was up at the end of April.  I was very excited for Mzungu, but dropping him off at the airport was a very sad day for me.  By this time, I had learned of my acceptance to Thunderbird, so that was my one small consolation.

Knowing that so much change would be coming at once, I pushed myself to stay active and to pack as much in on the east coast as I could, in case I don't make it back that way.  I got a new, more aerodynamic haircut that even a Vietnamese stylist couldn't screw up:

   
They can't screw it up mainly because I do it myself now.  So much easier.  So much less stressful.  And cheap.  No shoulder massage afterward, though.  Everything in life has tradeoffs.

I also ran a few races.  First was the Charlottesville half-marathon. It was a blast running through the UVA campus and the wooded farmland outside of Charlottesville.  We visited James Madison's estate, Montpelier, on the way back to DC.

The first weekend in May, I joined a team with Mr. and Mrs. Dirty Harry, as well as Lady Justice for an Amazing Race-style run around the city.  It was probably more exhausting than the half-marathon, to be quite honest.  Fun though.  As much as losing is ever fun.  Got to see a lot of parts of the city I'd never visited.

The following weekend, I went to the second leg of the Triple Crown of horse racing, The Preakness.

It's called 'The People's Race' because they let the riff-raff populate, and sometimes copulate, on the infield while some crappy rock band like Nickleback provides the white trash mood music.  We, of course, had grandstand seats so that we could actually see the race and avoid the ruffians.  Which we did, for most of the day.

Don't ask me about the hats.  I have no answers for you.

Notice the Jaegermeister tent in the infield.  It was that sort of scene.

 

A group of us did go as a diplomatic envoy into the bowels of the infield to mingle with the commoners and collect data on their habits. 

The Diplomats

Ultimately, we found their rituals to be savage and uncouth.  For $20, they would sell you a red plastic cup that entitled you to free beer refills all day as long as you didn't lose your cup, and could still raise your hand to the tap.  One clever wildling had duct-taped the cup to his hand, but had, in his exuberance, consumed far too much of the frothy beverage to stand up, let alone make the return trip to the dispensary.  Cleavage was in abundance, male and female, both on the chest and lower back.  It felt like the third day of a KISS tribute band festival.  So after completing our information gathering mission, we beat hoof back to higher ground and watched the rest of the races.  I made some bets and subsequently got hammered on them, but I was mostly just picking randoms, and had no expectation of winning.  It just makes the race more fun when you have skin in the game.

The following weekend, a group of about 15 people decided to drive to Hilton Head Island, SC, to run a mini-triathlon.  Hilton Head is about ten hours from DC.  The race started at 6 AM on Saturday morning.  I had taken Friday off in order to make a leisurely day of the drive.  Plans sometimes change.  My friend and current roommate, Bullit, had to leave town for a business trip. He wouldn't return to DC until 5 PM on Friday and had no way of getting to the race on his own.  So I stuck around to pick him up that evening and drive down together.  It was a lucky thing we did, because we ended up picking up one more travel companion that had meetings early on Friday and would have been unable to go without our late caravan.  Together we pulled out of DC around 5:30 in our Nissan Cube rental car, SC-bound.

The problem with the late departure is that we didn't get checked in to our hotel and get to sleep until 3 AM on Saturday.  We slept for two-and-a-half hours and hustled to the starting area.  I'll tell the rest of the race in pictures:

Most of our group preparing for the swim portion

 Yes, 50-year old Moobs beat me in the swim.  Shut up about it already.

Unless you want to look like Jack Tripper, spend the extra $15 and rent a racing bike.

 DONE!  Can we go to the beach now?

Not yet.  Lunch at the Salty Dog first.  Refueling after a race is important.

 Darkness washed over The Dude, and his sleep was glorious.

 

The following weekend was Duck, which I've detailed here and here.  The weekend after that was tubing the Shenandoah, which I detailed here.

So for those keeping track, we're now at the second weekend of June.  This was the weekend of the demolition derby in rural Maryland.  A demolition derby so big, they needed different weight classes.  There was the compact, four-cylinder class with its Mazdas and Sentras and Corollas.  There was the V-6 sedan class.  There were the 'exotics,' minivans and cross-overs mostly.  And then there were the SUVs/trucks.  Driving a '78 Chevy Suburban in a demo derby sounds like it would be so much cooler than it actually was.  Those big ships were too heavy to get any speed in such a small space and their steel was too strong to do much real damage.  Surprisingly, the compacts were the most fun to watch, because they were flying around the field.

To be continued...

...soonish.