Stalking the Trenton Thunder

We went to Trenton to spend an evening with TIm's sister, Susan, and her family, and to add another pin to our baseball stadium map.  (This hangs in the kitchen along with its more famous cousin, our National Parks Pin Map.)  The Thunder, the AA afiliate of the NY Yankees play in Trenton, and while one hates to offer any support for the Yankees at any level, one trip to the park is required in a lifetime in order to get the pin.  (Someday, there could be a Ronald Reagan NPS site--the Boyhood Home has already been proposed--and we would have to go there one time, too.  Fortunately, that day is far in the future!)

The worst of the experience was getting there--it took us 7 hours and 15 minutes to get to the park; 5 hours and 15 minutes would have been more reasonable.  We hit traffic on 95 about a minute into the trip, right outside of RIchmond.  No clear reason for it; just heavy traffic.  By the time we got to Fredericksburg and stopped for lunch, we had had enough of giant I-95 traffic jams, and couldn't face the DC disaster.  So we plumped for 301 through Maryland, around DC and Baltimore.  (In a sidebar:  even the Wendy's was a traffic jam; there must have been 20 people in line, and it wasn't moving.  After about 10 minutes, during which we advanced about 1 person's worth, we elected to bypass that clog as well, and went next door to the Taco Bell, which was empty.)  The lunchtime dodge was more successful than the traffic dodge, however; the worst traffic of the day was inexplicably through Delaware, which should have caused no problem at all.  Instead, we spent more time in Delaware than we've spent in all our lives put together prior to this point.  (Delaware, btw, is the only state with no National Park site.  There is a minor league team, though...the Wilmington Blue Rocks.  Next time we get stuck in traffic, maybe we'll just head there.)

Whatever.  We rolled up to the park at 6:30 for a 7:00 start, only to discover that out-of-towners who don't know what they are doing and follow the crowd into the parking garage make a HUGE mistake.  It was 20 more minutes before we made it to the ticket window.  This is a minor league park, remember!  The place only seats 6000 people.  The parking lot is about 100 feet from the entrance.

What are all these people doing here?  Why are the traffic directors sending two lines of traffic into the garage from two entrances, when they have to funnel down to one line of traffic inside the garage?  Why do people driving giant SUV's think they have to back into spaces they barely fit into forward?

(I won't regale you with the attempt to get out of the garage after the game; it was much worse.)

After all that laborious effort expended in getting there, one might think that the game would be a letdown, but we had a really good time.  It was of course good to spend an evening with Sue, Scott, and the kids, so that pretty much canceled out the cars.  But the game was fun too; the hot dogs are good at Waterfront Park, and the fans are good-natured.  Scott refused to let us buy the tickets or the hot dogs (an unexpected gift--thank you Scott and Sue!!). The Yankees lost (always a bonus!), and, it turned out, there were fireworks after the game, which explained the traffic, perhaps, and capped off the evening nicely.