New York, New York (Pictures Day 20)

In summary: New York City had a life of it’s own in my head. In early August 2016, I visited there for the first time. On the first afternoon we visited Central Park and were there for hours, despite the jet lag. Day One started with a tour of the Intrepid and the Space Shuttle Enterprise, followed by the full two and a half hour cruise around Manhattan – south down the Hudson River into the Upper Harbor, up the East River under the “BMW” bridges, past Midtown and the UN, into the Harlem River, back south into the Hudson River, underneath the George Washington Bridge, past Grant’s Tomb, and finally back into port. To finish Day Two we had a death march to find a cab, went to the Mets game, left early only to miss the best part, and inadvertently stiffed a nice cab driver. Bright & early on Day Three we headed out toward Liberty Island – it’s hard to take a bad picture there, then went to Ellis Island. Bank on Manhattan, we went to World Trade Center Museum, which was emotional & grueling. Day Four started out with a trip to Times Square, after which we headed to the Empire State Building. The views of Manhattan were spectacular!

Following our obligatory tourist visit to the Empire State Building, we had to boogie off to the Bronx. We had a coincidental appointment with history and some bombers.

When we travel, we love to see other ballparks, and one of the best of the best was next on our list.

This is the third iteration of this particular cathedral of sport. Until the time machine gets out of the shop we won’t be able to visit either of the earlier ones, but this one is pretty spectacular on its own.

Even though we were there a good three hours before game time, the place was already getting pretty packed. It was a real lucky break that we had bought tickets for this particular date months earlier. It was truly a hot ticket, but we weren’t giving up ours, even though we almost could have paid for the trip in what we could have gotten if we had scalped them.

There were a LOT of news vans and media crews there, even for New York City! Local, national, international, all turned out in droves for the game this day. Satellite uplink trunks for blocks and blocks.

It turns out that the game we picked (because it fit into our schedule) was Alex Rodriguez’s final game, with all of the pomp and circumstance associated with that.

We sat around outside the gates and watched the crowd for a couple of hours, especially all of the news crews and media “celebrities.” I don’t have a clue who this woman was, but she set up shop right in front of our bench and was drawing quite a bit of attention, for example.

Once we got to our seats out by the left field foul pole, I started the usual stadium tour that I always try to take when I’m at a new stadium for the first time. Our seats weren’t quite this close to the field, but that turned out to be a good thing.

The crowd was looking for ARod and I was loving the atmosphere of such a legendary site.

Once out in dead center field, about an hour before the actual game, looking back to the west, I noticed that the clouds were building up.

Huh.

Ten minutes later, now outside of the right field bleachers, it really started to look nasty.

There were a ton of pre-game ceremonies planned to say goodbye to ARod – but maybe God isn’t an ARod fan?