Thursday; Nationals Park - Washington, D.C.

NY Mets vs. Washington Nationals 7:05 pm

After waking up at 7am and waiting an interminable period of time at the border crossing, we finally made it to the airport for our final journey home. Say what you want about Detroit, but the airport has the single best food establishment I’ve ever patronized – an entire stand devoted solely to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!! Do you have any idea how awesome this concept is to a person living on hot dogs, nachos and funnel cake for the past 4 days?? No, it's not healthy, but it was exactly what I needed at that point in time! I opted for a chunky peanut butter, marshmallow and chocolate sandwich along with a small carton of milk. Sweet Lord, that may have been the greatest sandwich I’ve ever had in my entire life!

Back in DC, the wife met Todd and I at the airport and we went back to our house for a quick nap. A few hours before game time, Todd and I headed into DC to do some sightseeing. We stopped by the Spy Museum to see if we could get in and, of course, we couldn’t.

We eventually hopped onto the metro and weren’t really surprised to see that the Mets fans outnumbered the Nats fans by about 5-1. Seriously, nobody in this town gives a damn about the home team – the only people who attend games are the opposing team’s fans. It’s kinda sad, actually.

The area surrounding the stadium is total crap. It’s in one of the worst parts of DC, though they are trying to build it into something nice, which I give them high marks for. The stadium is pretty nice and the main attraction is the biggest HD scoreboard in the world (or something like that). Unfortunately our seats were in the outfield and under the section above us. That meant that we couldn’t see the damn thing! The game and the crowd was pretty boring. Once the Nats blew the game open, that’s when the crowd came alive. Welcome to the party – hope your ride on the bandwagon is long-lived! I can’t imagine what a TV viewer would think when watching the game because the entire section behind home plate –dubbed the Presidents Club at a cost of $350/ticket – was empty!

After the game we and the other 30,000 fans headed to the metro to go home. One of defects of the park is that only people in the Presidents Club can park at the stadium. Elitist pricks!! Everyone else has to take the metro or walk through the shittiest part of DC. We opted for the metro. I figured this was the point in time when karma would pay us back for the 5 consecutive no-hassle stadium departures. Despite the large crowd, we were out of the stadium, on the metro and back at home in no time.

Back at home base, around 11:10 pm, I was getting ready to tuck Todd in and sing him a lullaby (he can’t sleep without sweet music drowning out the screaming voices in his head). But tonight, we came up with a great idea – let’s turn on SportsCenter and see if the grand slam hit to our section was on TV. We turned on the tube and right then and there, the game’s highlights popped up. And sure enough, the grand slam hit by Felipe Lopez was on. See, since there was nobody in the stands, you could see exactly who was where in the ballpark. Thanks to the miracle that is the DVR, we were able to pause, rewind and freeze the picture. And sure enough, if you squinted hard enough, you could see Todd and I on SportsCenter!! You couldn’t have ended the trip any better.

My sincere thanks to my wife for allowing me the opportunity to leave for a few days and get some much needed time off. Also, my thanks to Uncle Jeremy, Aunt Stacey and Grandma Joanie for coming over and helping wrangle the little monsters.

Also, a colossal thanks and congratulations to Todd for being my partner in crime and not pushing me out of the plane or onto the train tracks when the opportunity presented itself.

To the Baseball Gods that were surely watching over us, thanks for the phenomenal weather, ease of exiting the stadiums and for giving us two Yankee wins and two Met losses. I’m sure the price will be the Yankees missing the playoffs for the first time in 13 years, but that’s ok – I’m going to need until the end of October to recuperate anyway.

And finally, for those of you nice enough to read this whole thing, here are two separate links to pictures from the trip. The first set is from Todd, the second are mine. Todd likes to take more pictures than I do, FYI. Enjoy!