A Baseball Blogger's Vacation

While you were busy eating your burgers and blowing off your fingers with fireworks, the hardest working blogger in South Jersey (probably not true), was making a baseball pilgrimage to follow the Phillies up to America Jr for a 3 game set against the Toronto Blue Jays. Four tanks of gas, a nerve wrecking experience with border patrol, and copious amounts of alcohol later I'm back stateside and ready to share my experience with the 7 or 8 of you who will actually read this...

Day 1 - Depart en route to Buffalo, NY
One final Wawa stop and we're on the road... First stop is Binghamton, NY where Google tells me is a sports bar. Turns out to be more like an abandoned truck stop. No worries, there's another place just two or three miles away called "The Sports Bar." How can we go wrong with that? Well, it's either closed down or simply MIA, but we do end up at a decent enough place called Dillingers. But they don't carry the MLB Package and the Phils are already under way against Boston. We follow the game on Twitter as Cole Hamels gets drilled in the hand and leaves the game, giving David Herndon the opportunity to do what he does best: crap the bed. Still, a series victory and soon we're back on the road to Buffalo.

We check into the hotel, grab some beers in the lobby and head to Anchor Bar, home of the original Buffalo Wings.

It's a small little place, but well worth the stop. Naturally, it's packed and a bit touristy, but they managed to serve us at the bar and we had our food within about 10 minutes. A few more beers (and a new record in the bar top PhotoHunt game!) and we're on our way to the waterfront to catch a concert. On our journey, we come accross these young gentlemen:

I have no idea what they're saying, but I was equally entertained/frightened. Later, Buffalo gave us a few more fun moments at the Pearl Street Brewery, Coca Cola Park (home of the Buffalo Bisons), and a little Irish Pub called Irish Times ($30 for 12 beers was the last reasonably priced drinking experience of the trip.)

Day 2 - Niagra Falls & Toronto
We hit the road in the morning (closer to noon once the first hangover wore off), and headed toward the border. We were warned that booze is ridiculous on the other side of the border so we stopped at the Duty Free and picked up as much as we legally could (approx 1 case per person, or one large bottle of liquor if you're scoring at home).

Then I held my breath and headed for the border crossing. Despite my fears that a run in with the law from a decade ago might end this trip before it began, we made it over without a single issue.

Niagara is a pretty intense place. You're able to stand literally just a few feet from where the water crashes, and the town resembles a miniature Las Vegas with attractions and shops brightly lit and the storefronts buzzing. I thought it might be a little cheesy, but it was worth the stop.

Onward to Toronto. Two more hours of driving in which we listened to the Blue Jays fail to beat Kyle Kendrick, and we arrive at the hotel (which was inexplicably out of parking spaces)! A place called the Pickle Barrel for dinner, followed by $10 drinks and singing "Just a Friend" at the top of our lungs at a place called Crocodile Rock, throwing water filled condoms at a couple of Random chicks on a sidewalk, and having my ear chatted in by an Iranian-Canadian who was trying to convince me to head to the ghetto and buy weed. It was an incredibly interesting night.

Day 3 - Halladay in Toronto
If they couldn't scratch out a win against Kyle Kendrick, then they really had no shot against Roy Halladay. As we walked to the stadium after a few hours of pregaming in the hotel room, it was clear that Canadians are just ridiculously nice people. For the most part, they couldn't even muster up enough mean spirits to be upset with the way RAJ pried their franchise player from their fingers.

The Rogers Center is a cross between new and old. It has an inner city ballpark feel, with a multipurpose concrete bowl skeleton. The place was packed with over 45,000 people, but we still managed to sneak down to about 4 rows behind the dugout for the first inning. Plenty of nice pics followed:

After getting the boot, we went back up to our ticketed seats above home plate. Not a bad view from there either:

But apparently the game wasn't interesting enough to keep this guy awake:

We enjoyed some $11 Alexander Keith's Beer and played some Blue Jays Plinko:

In the later innings, we snuck back down to the field level and found some more seats where we watched a terrible attempt at running on the field, and Jon Rauch throw an epic hissy fit on a play that pretty obviously safe from where I was sitting.

Ate some lunch at the highly recommended "Real Sports Bar," drank some more beers in the hotel, then we hit another pub for the UFC fight. Around this time, things got a little hazy for me so you'll have to forgive me for the lack of photographic evidence.

Day 4 - Can Lee Continue the Streak?
We decided to hit up the Hockey Hall of Fame in the morning on our last full day in Toronto. I have two thoughts on the HoF... First, it's brilliant that they put the Hall in such a major city where there is constant tourism for things other than just hockey. We're there for a baseball game and we're visiting the Hockey HoF. I don't think Cooperstown gets any traffic from people on Hockey related road trips. But my other thought is that it was incredibly odd of them to put the HoF in what equated to the basement of a mall. The signage outside was a limited and I'm sure you could walk right by it without even realizing where you were. Nevertheless, at $17 it's pretty much the cheapest thing to do in Toronto:

Onward to the game. Our seats for this one were row 4 off the outfield wall and directly above the Phillies Bullpen. Ryan Madson took some time to test out his injured hand by tossing bubble gum and sunflower seeds into the crowd between innings, and Michael Stutes sat right below us attentively watching through the bullpen fence.

Unfortunately, Cliff Lee could not repeat his previous month's worth of shutdown performances as he let up bomb after bomb to a host of right handed Blue Jays. The Jays fans got on us a little bit, but for the most part seemed to understand that they're a 4th place team with a sub .500 record and winning on game really isn't anything to cheer about. But boy do they love their Jose Bautista up there!

Again, the architecture of the Rogers Center is pretty cool with the dome closing after the game, and whatever these guys are supposed to be:

We hit the lake front harbor area for some more photo-ops, and headed back to the hotel for some rest. Dinner outdoors, followed by a few drinks at a Micro-Brewery in an area of Toronto we dubbed "Time Square Jr" led to a drunken night of us singing patriotic songs (as well as "High Hopes") during our walk back to the hotel.

Day 5 - Home
About 10 hours after leaving Toronto, about 7 bags of chips, a lunch stop at Syracuse University, and about 4 other pee breaks later we arrived home exhausted and poor.

It was a great trip and one that is going to be very tough to top next year. In the past few years I've been to Cooperstown, DC, Baltimore, both New Yorks, Boston, St. Louis, and I'm planning to do the Phillies minor league circuit later this summer. If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

More pictures are available here.

Visit this guy's website! (Since I stole a handful of pictures from him, it's the least I can do!)