After a springtime of teasing and crushing our weather dreams, the atmosphere finally conspired to give us the perfect weekend for our fifth annual BroSox Adventure. Skip and I tore out of Albany into a sun-drenched day, timing our arrival for maximum parking options along with enough time to decompress before the game. Despite such planning, not all goes according to plan, and about halfway there the traffic suddenly slowed to a standstill. There are always little pockets of that on a Friday afternoon, but this looked different. According to Skip’s handy Google maps app, we discovered a long delay because of an accident, and Google was advising to get off and re-enter the Mass Pike right before the location of the accident. It said it would save an hour and twenty minutes, and we needed that time, so off the road we went. A couple of sketchy and rather bumpy roads later, we were back on the Pike with no harm done and no time lost. The universe will always help those who need it, especially if you have a good friend navigating in the passenger seat.
We arrived in perfect time for a visitor’s parking space to opened up right on Braddock Park. As we get older, and our various and often disparate responsibilities become more important and pronounced, a weekend like this is a Godsend. We eased into it quietly and happily, embracing the slower pace, cradled in the air-conditioned hum of the condo. There is something wonderful about stillness and slowing things down. Just one day out of life… we needed a holiday.
A grapefruit aperol gin concoction and a MacCallan on one big rock later, we were setting about to do the single handy-man task that needed doing. A throwback to the much-more-intensive AC-unit installation from a few years ago, we were going to put up a new mirror in the bathroom. Nothing too major, but major enough that Skip insisted on measuring shit, at one point requesting a level that simply didn’t exist in the condo’s drawer of sorely-limited tools. Of course he put it up in professional fashion, making the right design and placement choices when my own questioning indecision had me briefly wondering about various things.
That done, we sat down at the table overlooking Braddock Park, finished our cocktails, and decompressed before getting an Uber to the game. We’re still refining the best schedule to keep when it comes to game day/night, but we have honed it down to a night game, preferably on day one, which is what we did this year, and it worked out brilliantly.
Changing things up was part of the plan. That began with our seats. For the first time, we opted to try out the bleachers. We’d been up close and personal with the players on all of our previous trips. This time we were going to be far out, where Skip assured me there was a more fun scene, with possibly more rowdy fans and a camaraderie that may have gone missing from former locations. Given the Red Sox record this year (and later that night) I wasn’t as keen to see the game all that close-up anyway, so we saved some money and got the cheap seats in the back. They were fine – and the night was glorious weather-wise, so we got a fine view, if from a bit far away.
At one point, a group of four ladies came and sat in the row in front of us. I was only half-listening when I heard Skip say something along the lines of how much they reminded him of the movie ‘Set It Off.’ I promptly excused myself, because that could have gone very, very wrong, so I fled for a couple of draft beers. I returned to find Skip scrolling through the selfies he took with them. Crisis averted. We later ran into them outside the stadium after the game was over and they posed for another picture, which is the featured one that also gives title to this post. Leave it to Skip and the Red Sox to bring the people together.
We’d not had much to eat, other than a few snacks and a Boursin spread at the condo, so Skip returned with two Fenway franks. Part of our whole Cheap Change Boston experience the time around. Despite much spilled mustard – on my bracelets, on my jeans, on my arm – we survived, and were ready for another round of draft beer. Which is utterly ridiculous, but when in Rome…
Skip had received a text to head toward home plate or something, so we headed in that direction thinking there was some connection he had that would suddenly let us into a glass-fronted box seat or free-champagne-land, but after worming our way through Fenway, and popping back in to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’, we realized with the sudden mass-exodus that the Red Sox had already lost the game. We joined the dejected masses departing and ran in to the ‘Set It Off’ gang, took a quick photo, then doubled back to the condo and a long-promised Peking duck dinner.
Various stories have circulated over whose idea this was, but somewhere over the years the notion of a Peking duck dinner was a bucket-list item for Skip. I’d had it a number of times and was game to make it happen for him, so after one more cocktail for the road, we took the T into Chinatown, hoping to find either the 24-hour magical diner that is only there sporadically, or the Chinatown restaurant I knew served the dish.
To be fair, I was not in a totally cognizant state of being able to find much of anything, certainly not an elusive enchanted diner that could disappear at will, nor the Chinatown restaurant that was already closed by the time we got there. I told Skip to pose in front of the entrance to Chinatown, at which point this stranger decided to get in on the act and photobomb the shit out of our night. He appears here because he earned it, and it’s indicative of how our meal went for that night.
We were left with the last dredges of Chinatown restaurants, so we just took the first thing that said they were open. The entire staff seemed to be sitting at the main table, so if we’d had any sense we might have figured out it was closing time. We didn’t. So we ordered. Some lo mein, some fried rice, some beef satay, and some orange chicken. They didn’t do orange chicken, which we found out after waiting for it after finishing the rest of the dishes. A disappointing attempt at Peking duck. Luckily it was only the first night. Skip would get his Peking duck, eve if we had to leave yet another restaurant to do so. But that’s a story for the next post…
We walked back to the condo as Boston Pride swirled around us. We would skirt the main festivities and parade for most of the weekend, which is exactly how I liked it.
