Our first two forays into
the Major Leagues were pretty
successful so it only seemed fair to my wife that we plan a trip to
Shea Stadium to see a Mets game. She’s a lifelong fan and had never
been.. coincidentally her birthday is in September so as a birthday
present I picked up tickets to a Mid September game against the Cubs.
This was especially fortuitous because now Nomar Garciaparra was now
a member of the Cubs, so it was a win win situation in my book.
Jackie gets to see the Mets, and I get to see Nomar.

When Jackie’s sister, Dee,
hears of our plans to go to Shea, she expressed an interest in
joining us with her partner, Todd. So I pick up 7 tickets to a game.
At that time, Mets tickets were relatively easy to come by since it
was September and the Mets were 20 games out of the NL East. We wind
up with some pretty decent Mezzanine level seats just a couple of
sections down towards first base. Not bad for a last minute
purchase. We drove down as New York as it is a pretty easy day trip
from Albany.

I have a few vivid memories of
this particular trip.. the best was that of seeing my daughter’s face
on the scoreboard.. at one point between innings a camera guy is
walking up our aisle and he focuses in on Breanne sitting there
looking cute and next thing you know her face is on the scoreboard..
wow.. I frantically reached for my camera to try and get a picture..
In the meantime she turns slightly towards the cameraman and you can
see on the scoreboard that she’s wearing a pink Nomar Red Sox
Tshirt.. almost immediately the picture changes to some other random
people in the crowd. The moment was lost, except in my mind she’s
still up there on that screen.

The 2^nd
memory from that day has to do with Breanne’s hero, Nomar. He hit
what I thought at the time was a home run, but turned out to be a
ground rule double. I was taking video of his at bat and got the
whole thing. I thought it went out because the outfielders gave up
running and I didn’t see it bounce looking through the camera. It
looked like a home run to me at least.. it was off of Al Leiter.
The Mets did won the game 3-2, so it was a good day.

Last memory of this trip was
discovering Main Street Sweets in Tarrytown, NY. Driving home we got
out of the city and stopped in Tarrytown for something to eat. The
place we ate at didn’t really serve dessert, but the waitress
recommended an ice cream shop a short walk down the street. So we
walked down and discovered Main Street Sweets. Ever since this trip
it has become the final stop for us whenever we are heading home
after a game in the City. They have excellent homemade ice cream in
a shop that is reminiscent of Ben and Jerry’s when it was a place no
one knew about.

Soon after this trip, we
started thinking about what to do for vacation the next summer.
During these discussions, Jackie mentions how cool would it be to see
a game at Wrigley Field. I agree and add in as long as we are going
to Chicago, might as well see a White Sox game as well and hey
looking at this map it looks like Milwaukee isn’t far, let’s make a
trip out of it, maybe even do Minnesota. At this point what started
out as a few harmless day trips was starting to turn into something
more.

Some pictures from that day ..

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Well because of this blog I was asked to be interviewed for a magazine article.. well the article came out yesterday and is online here

We are locked in for this year’s vacation.. this year the Agan’s will be retracing some steps in order to visit some new parks in places we’ve already been. In July we are going down to Washington DC to see the Nats play the Mets. We’ve seen the Nats at RFK, but not at the new park yet. By popular demand of the kids we are going to ‘camp’ again which for us means a cabin with A/C at a campground. Not exactly what I would pick, but once in awhile you have to cave in.. We’ll be staying near my brother’s house in Northern VA near the Bull Run battlefield. I typically like to be right in the middle of the action, but when you are camping, you can’t exactly sleep on the National Mall.. unless you dress like homeless people..

Instead of one big trip, this year we are doing two mini trips.. the second will be to New York CIty to see the Mets and the Yankees at their new homes. Since we live within day trip vicinity of New York, we’ve never done a lot of the touristy things in the city like we have elsewhere, so this time we are going to do just that. We are staying at a hotel right near Times Square and are going to try and take in as much of the Big Apple as we can in 4 days along with 2 ball games. This trip will happen in August.

I’ve already secured tickets to all the games and thanks to the new stadiums it’s nosebleeds in the Bronx and Queens for us. Thanks to stubhub it’s at least decent nosebleeds.. right behind home plate at Yankee and right above 3rd base at Citifield. Washington is an easy ticket score so I got those off the website and got down near the field just past 3rd base. I could have scored primo tickets to both NY games on the Yankees and Mets websites, but at $1000/seat I think I’ll pass.. I guess most people will as those seats are available for just about every game. The ‘cheap’ seats are gonna be scarce.

Hopefully as the season progresses, I’ll get back to chronicling our previous adventures..