San Diego: Half the traffic, twice the mustard
By Daren Many
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — This round of thanks goes to three people. Jack and Judy Roach put us up for three nights in a sweet pad in San Diego. Not only did they give us a place to sleep, but they fed us and allowed us to do our laundry. They treated us like royalty and we couldn’t have been happier to meet them.
The third person in my Thank You Hall of Fame goes to that lady at Petco Park who sold me a dog, soda, and fries for $8. For those of you who’ve been to the ballpark, you know this would easily cost $215 on a normal day.
I’ve had a lot of people text me about the Nolan situation. I will not address that in this blog as Nolan has one more game with us in Denver. I’ll speak about the ketchup/mustard machine outside the concession stand in Section 227, though.
It should be outlawed. It’s a menace to society and should be torn down. I did get my hot dog meal for only $8, but nearly $16 dollars worth of mustard came out of that thing, rendering my hot dog completely useless as a food source.
What happened next was completely unexpected. I moved on to the ketchup spout and tried to outsmart it. That was my first problem, because it spewed out a thin stream at the speed of light. Ketchup came out faster than anything I’ve ever seen and it hit the dog with such force that it backfired onto my new Tom Seaver jersey. This threw me into a mood that would only worsen when the Mets lost in the bottom of the ninth.
Now, it has been our ritual on this trip to buy a window sticker representing each Major League team and place it in ceremonial fashion on the side of our Jeep. All these stickers have matched so far, but not at Petco. In perfect fashion the only sticker we found had a bunch of flowers around the San Diego logo.
If you look at our Jeep window it looks like we went to five major league stadiums and a botanical garden association conference. These issues aside, the city of San Diego and Petco Park were great. Both rate very highly in my book. The city must form a committee to look into the condiments machines, though.
Unbelievably, I left out something in my last blog that should have been addressed immediately. I will tell this story now.
As we were leaving Dodger Stadium the other night I heard someone yelling in my general direction. I turned to see a guy in a yellow hat. I know what you’re thinking, and no it wasn’t the man who owns Curious George. It was the Livestrong guys from Oakland (read my Oakland blog). I don’t know how they recognized us, but there they were. I couldn’t believe it. They’re so nice but their successes sometimes make us feel like we haven’t planned our project effectively. Of course, as we were getting harassed by stadium security they were getting to meet Joe Torre and Nomar Garciaparra.
Because we just drove 16 hours straight from San Diego to Denver I need to go to bed. We have a Rockies game on Sunday and then it’s off toward the Midwest.
Mets: 5.5 games back.
(There’s more on this and our other adventures at BaseCrawl.com.)
