Fenway Park

After breakfast, we packed our walking backpacks and headed out toward Fenway which was a little over a 2 mile walk. Boston is a beautiful walking city with the Charles river going through and multitudes of beautiful historic buildings as well as the campuses of Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Berklee School of Music. We arrived early at Fenway but there were already large crowds milling around, filling restaurants and bars, hawking 1 dollar programs with a free giveaway of baseball cards or “Free Brady” stickers. There were also “Free Brady” shirts.  Poor Tommy, boo hoo!

 They are passionate about their teams around here. We explored Fenway Stadium. What a historic place! We tried to get near the Green Monster to touch it, but no such luck. We did see an area on the roof where they were growing organic vegetables that they use in the food they serve in the suite section and donate the rest to the food bank. Last week they gave #200 of organic produce. Way to go Fenway!

 They had a very large number of fans on this beautiful Sunday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, many families. We had our Mariner's shirts on and were surprised that everyone was really nice to us and said nothing about the Super Bowl. We sat next to a couple and their 2 year old who was a huge baseball fan. He was from the DC area, his wife worked at the Pentagon and he was a Kansas City Royals fan. Much to our dismay he showed us a passport book for visiting ballparks. I couldn't believe this was happening again. On our last road trip we learned after visiting numerous National Parks that there was a passport book which we now have. 13 stadiums too late. Boo Hoo! After arriving at our seats we finally realized what Josh and Kevin are talking about with the new stadiums in the Ultimate Baseball Roadtrip book and how all the seats are directed at homeplate and the action. Our seats faced us into center field so we had to turn left the whole game to see home plate, and these were the most expensive seats we had purchased so far for our trip. Too bad we didn't know about the book before we bought our tickets!

Pesky pole at 302 feet and our view into center field.  Notice the turned head to the left.
Over a week later and my neck still hurts!

Big enthusiastic crowd!

 The home crowd was very enthusiastic and great fans! They sing Neil Diamond's Sweet Caroline in the 8^th inning. We watched Boston defeat the Anaheim Angels. We told our new friend about Unbound and David from Guatamala, representing Boston player David Ortiz.  Getting sponsors is getting tricky! After the game we walked around Boston, over to the Commons and past a few sights on the Freedom trail that we are going to do tomorrow. We ate dinner at a restaurant called Scholars and then walked back to Cambridge through Beacon Hill.

Old fashioned hand operated scoreboard

Beautiful brownstones

Seats on top of the Green Monster