Day 30

We have gotten to sleep in before, but it’s usually been in a hotel. We had all morning to bum around Andrew’s house and enjoy a lazy Saturday complete with homemade pancakes before driving into New York. It was an especially eventful ride because we got to drive over the bridge to the Holland tunnel 3 times to get there. We realized that we had left the tickets behind a little too late. Despite that little setback, we still made pretty good time into the city. 

  We went to Zum Schneider, an authentic German beer garden. The 7 of us decided to go for a monster platter to share along with out beer and pretzels. It came with at least 6 types of sausages, pork chops, thick bacon, potatoes, sauerkraut, and plenty of mustard. None of us left hungry after that meal. 

We figured out our plan for the train, and found out everyone else in NYC had the same one. The cars were packed pretty full, and the trains were moving very slowly. That equation made for some irritable riders, but we dealt with their snarky-ness and made it to Yankee Stadium all the same. 

  This was our only time on the trip seeing the Yankees, so we were all expecting big things. In the original schedule, we were supposed to be in New York yesterday and Philly today. We switched the game order so that we could go to the Yankees’ Old Timers’ Day. If we had gone yesterday, we would have seen A Rod’s 3,000th hit. Today had to be a good day. 

We got into the park around 4, the earliest we had ever gotten to 7:15 baseball game and enjoyed the festivities. We witnessed Willie Randolph be inducted into Memorial Park, and got to see a great game of Old Timers’ baseball! 

  The Yankees were off to a good start after the 1st inning, and the hits kept coming. They were playing the Detroit Tigers, and this is not how we remembered the Tigers playing at all. Usually they move the game along pretty quickly and put some hits up on the board. The Yankees blew them out of the water with a final score of 14-3. 

  Andrew’s family came with us to this game, and it was a lot of fun to have such a fun group of Yankees fans at a game like this. We learned about a few other interesting fans at the game. Our trip is pretty unique, but we aren’t the first to try to see all 30 parks in about a month, and we won’t be the last. We saw in the Daily Herald (a Chicago based newspaper) that there were two guys doing the trip in 30 days too! It turns out that they were at the Miami game and the Phillies game at the same time as us, and they were at the Yankees game on the same night too. We tried to meet up with them for a picture and to trade some stories, but we ran out of time. Don’t worry though, we will all be at the Cubs game at the same time too, there is still hope for a photo opportunity! 

We had a pretty smooth ride back on the subway to the car and had a nice walk through the night life of the city before getting back to Andrew’s house. Going to bed will be more like a nap, we have about 4 hours before we need to be in the car again.