Last night

My train was 20 minutes late leaving Baltimore.  The train was originally scheduled to arrive at Newark Airport railway station just after 6pm, so I'd booked my dinner reservation at Classified for 7pm, thinking that an hour would be plenty of time to get to it, even if the train was a little bit late.

It was almost 6.40pm by the time we arrived, so I emailed them to let them know I might be a bit late.

Since I've made this trip into Newark airport so many times before, I knew exactly where I was going.  I was able to get the airtrain along to terminal Cand go straight to the fast-track security line.  I'd already prepared for security by emptying pockets and putting everything in my bags whilst still on the train,.

I also remembered which other restaurant I had to go to get into my destination restaurant.  Thanks to all of that, I actually turned up at precisely 7pm, so I needn't have emailed them after all!

There were two other tables in use, but after half an hour or so, those people left and I was the only one there - so it wouldn't have been an issue if I'd been late, anyway!  It's odd - you scan the QR code on the table to get the menu and then order on your phone and then the waiter brings the food to you when it's ready.

Even though it's very expensive here, I do like it because it is peaceful and quiet - other than the background music.  The TVs are all showing different channels, but they are on mute with subtitles enabled.

For this flight, I had the window seat - and so I was in charge of the window blind!

We spent ages wandering around the taxiways of the airport, not least because being a large, heavy flight, we have to start right at the end of the runway.

Night takeoffs  are always more spectacular to watch.  You can't really tell from this photo, but as the plane moves onto the live runway, just before it turns to line up, you can see all the way along the runway and see the lights in formation that you don't really see from sideways on.

I was on the left-hand side of the plane, so after take-off, I couldn't see Manhattan, but there was still a lot of see.

After a few minutes of climing, you are so high that you can just see a few lights of towns and cities, so I closed the blind and waited for dinner to be served. 

I had pre-ordered the beef, and although I ate all of that, I didn't eat much of the starter, as I'd had my dinner about 4 hours earlier.

One new revelation is that, on some flights at least, United now offer chocolate chips as one of the toppings available for the ice cream dessert, so I was able to have chocolate sauce, caramel sauce AND chocolate chips.

Since I had bought a month's wi-fi subscription from United to use on all my flights, I was able to connect to that and browse the web for a bit.

Although you are not permitted to stream video, you are able to stream audio, so I was able to listen to Classic FM as we were flying along.

It seems very modern to be able to listen to live UK radio whilst flying at 37000ft over Canada.  Since he asked, I even sent an email in to Sam Pittis telling him this and he read it out on air!  

Not only that, but I received a personal email reply from Sam wishing me a good flight.

I managed to get around 3-4 hours sleep, and having gone to sleep just as we passed the coast of Canada, I woke up just as we got to the coast of Northern Ireland.  Then it was breakfast time, although I didn't really fancy it much, as they'd put all sorts of stuff in the porridge that I didn't want.  The coffee was nice though.  There was lots of cloud, but it was pretty.

We wer late arriving at Heathrow, but remarkably, didn't have to circle for ages but landed straight away.  Even more remarkably, 15 minutes after touching down, I was in the arrivals lounge!

After disembarking, I walked the mile to immigration fairly briskly to overtake as many people as possible, especially with another flight having arrived at about the same time.  I didn't have to queue for the e-gates, went straight though - they are great when they work! - and out through customs and into the arrivals lounge.

I've been able to shower and have a proper breakfast - with proper back bacon, rather than incinerated streaky bacon!

I spent a couple of hours at the airport in the end, before getting the train home, arriving at 3.40pm, about 5 hours after touching down.  I knew there was no hurry, but less than an hour later, my Tesco delivery arrived, a little early!

So that's the end of his trip.  I ought to start planning next year's trip now, rather than leaving it until mid-August when some things are more expensive!

Final day in Baltimore

With my train ticket booked for the 3.48pm train to Newark Airport, I had only three or four hours spare in Baltimore on Friday morning.

Every other time I've visited Baltimore, the viewing platform in the World Trade Centre  building has been closed for one reason or another.  It's closed Monday-Wednesday anyway, plus it tends to be closed around 11th September too.  It also closes for private events from time to time.

It's only $8 to go up to the 27th floor and it has windows on all five sides for looking out over the area.

Oriole Park in the distance; M&T Bank stadium
is just betweeen the two skyscrapers

This is an actual WTC working office building, so there's a special lift that doesn't go to the other floors that you have to use, although it wasn't very busy so I didn't have to wait to go up.

It was a hot day again, so it was nice to spend over an hour in this building, even though there's not all that much to do except look at the sights, read the placards about the views and the "art" on display.

You can see the entire inner harbour area with the marina, and you can see both the MLB and NFL stadia, which are quite close together.  There are some skyscrapers in the way, by you can just about see the purple seats in M&T Bank stadium, home of the Baltimore Ravens NFL team.  Oriole Park at Camden Years, the MLB stadium is right there behind the long, brick warehouse.

Looking south-east towards the ex-bridge

From here, you can also see in the distance the remains of the Key bridge that was partially destroyed by a ship running into it a while ago.

Despite being on the 27th floor, it's not actually the tallest building in downtown Baltimore, but it is the easiest one to get to the top of.  There's a restaurant in another building that's taller, but you have to have a reservation to get to it.

I met a couple from Sheffield who were doing a circular tour of the northeast, starting in New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, going on to Washington DC, family in West Virginia, Boston and then New York to fly home.

I was able to give them some hints on getting around, since they'd actually walked from the railway station as they didn't know about the free bus.  I also let them know about the free Harbour Circulator boats.

After a while, I returned back to my hotel to pick up my bags and went to the bus stop to wait for the purple route circulator bus.  It was a bit late, so although I'd allowed quite a lot of time for it to be late and for the traffic, it only arrived at the station about 5 minutes before the train was due, which the Amtrak app on my phone confirmed was on time.

Even so, there was enough time to buy an iced coffee at the Dunkin' Donuts shop and hurry over to the platform - only then to find the train was running several minutes late!  It arrived 5 minutes later and then the power failed, but they managed to fix it and we were on our way 20 minutes later.

The train was very full, although there were still people sprawled out "asleep" across multiple seats.  My arms now ache after carrying my bag up to the front of the train and back again looking for seat.

Eventually, I shared a seat with a businessman who was resting rather than working and we made our way up towards New York.

Final game: San Francisco Giants @ Baltimore Orioles (game 3)

 A day game!

With a 1.05pm start, this is only the third day game I've had, and I was quite surprised to see the stands as full as they were.  Even though it's a Thursday afternoon, there appear to be lots of school-age children here.  There's a lot fewer empty seats on the club level too.  The upper deck is very sparsely populated though.

Today, I had a turkey carvery at the ballpark.  On a burger bun.  I could have had the beef instead, but I think I'm going to be having that for dinner this evening, so I had something different.

I also sat in my allotted seat today, even though it was crowded, as it wasn't as humid.  However, it has been the hottest day of my holiday today, with the temperature mid-afternoon at 30C/86F. 

Mike Yastrzemski didn't lead off the third game in a row with a home run.  In fact, there was no scoring until the fourth inning when Michael Conforto hit a 2-run HR for us, only for Baltimore to score 3 in the bottom of the 4th.

There was no more scoring until the Orioles' closer had a meltdown in the 9th inning trying to close out the win.

San Francisco managed to level the game up at 3-3 and were unlucky not to actually take the lead,

The bottom of the 9th inning was very tense, until Anthony Santander managed to just about hit a home run over the outstretched arm of the Giants right fielder to win the game for Baltimore 5-3.

There were a handful of other Giants fans around.  Unlike the 49ers game where the Jets fans stood out a mile because they were wearing green to everybody else's red, the Giants and the Orioles share the same colours of white/black/orange, so it was hard to locate other Giants supporters.

That wraps up the baseball portion of my trip, and indeed pretty much the whole thing.  Both the Giants and I are leaving town in the next 24 hours, although they are flying to Kansas City to start a three game series whilst I'll be flying home.

 

San Francisco Giants @ Baltimore Orioles (game 2)

During Tuesday's game, it was actually drizzling throughout the game, although fortunately, I was just about under the overhang of the top deck, so my seat wasn't wet and I wasn't rained on.  It was warm and humid again this evening and rain started to be in the air as I was walking along to the stadium.

When it's raining the ushers in each club level section accompany you to your seat and dry it off for you, and most people tip a $1 per seat for this service.  I didn't need that service yesterday, though.  However, when I found where my seat was, it was the one empty seat in the middle of a full row.

I was so hot that I decided to stay in the air-conditioned concourse instead for a bit to recover.  In the end, I walked all the way around looking for a chair in one of the alcoves all around the club level, but they were all in use at the time - I took this photo after the game was over and everybody was streaming out of the park.

In the end, I found an almost entirely empty section right by the foul pole that  I could sit in for a bit.  I had to wipe my own seat off all the way out here!  However, it was nice knowing that I could go in and out without disturbing anybody else.

 It was Bark at the Park night, so there were several people with dogs down on the bottom tier.  Various in-game features were modified to celebrate this, including the usually-animated hot dog race on the screen - which was an actual race with 3 hot dog costumes attached to dogs.

Last time we put up a double-digit score, we followed it up by scoring zero the next three games!  So I wasn't sure what to expect tonight.  Mike Yastrzemski managed to repeat his feat from the night before, leading off the game with another home run to put the Giants up 1-0 immediately.  I missed it again.

Again, we had excellent starting pitching, this time from Hayden Birdsong - a terrific name, and strange that a few years ago, we had a pitcher named Ryan Vogelsong (where "Vogel" is the German for "bird"!)  

In total, we scored 5 and just about managed to hold Baltimore down, so by the end of the game, the Giants hung on for a 5-3 win.  So in two nights here, I've seen twice as many wins as I saw in a week in San Francisco!

Harbour Walk

Today, I walked around the northern side of the harbour as I did last year, but I enjoyed it a lot more this time as I wasn't feeling ill.

There is a path along the waterfront, that occasionally had to go a block inland to avoid maintenance works.

There are lots of flowers in the planters that were dotted at occasional points along the path.  A lot of the housing looked very expensive.

I stopped off at Fell's Point on the way.  There are lots of shops for tourists here, including restaurants that I've eaten at before.

Many seem to have shut up shop, although it's hard to tell whether that's just for the season or permanent.  I note that the Riptide by the Bay, a restaurant I once ate at, now seems to have closed down, going by the padlock on the door.

I was able to get an iced coffee at a bakery, though and have a croissant.  That's the kind of place that locals use a lot.

I had made a reservation for 4pm at the Rusty Scupper, because I've been there before and I know it's really good.  It is on the opposite side of the harbour to my hotel and walk, though, so I planned to take the harbour connector boats back.

Eventually, I made it around to the Canton waterfront park where the free Harbour Connector boat service runs from.  It's quite strange, because the water taxi boats are used to provide this service with a small sign saying that today, it's identifying as the Harbour Connector.  At weekends, I think the same boats operate the harbour loop ($18 per ride, or $20 for an all-day pass!)

Each HC route is just one boat shuttling back and forth between two points, so the every half hour departures only take about 10 minutes to actually travel across, and the every 15 minute services are even quicker.

I just walked to the restaurant from my hotel, as it only takes 20 minutes to walk the other way around the harbour.  I arrived just a couple of minutes after my reservation time, which was fine, as it was fairly empty being quite early.

The food was excellent again, although as with the Franciscan Crab in San Francisco, and as I thought I'd remembered from last year, my server Tomi wasn't able to charge my credit card.

Unlike the Franciscan Crab, where it was a a huge performance including photocopying my passport and cards, they are used to it here and I just had to go over to the till and enter the PIN when it asked and then it all authorised normally.

It has been warm and humid here.  Apparently it's the remnants of a storm from the south that's petered out from being a hurricane, but just sent the weather up the east coast.

After dinner, I returned to my hotel to drop off my backpack and pick up my Giants hat and set off for the game.

San Francisco Giants @ Baltimore Orioles (game 1)

Tuesday was my first complete day in Baltimore, and I spent most of it in my room trying to sleep.  The workmen using a pneumatic drill on the street below all morning did not help.  I'm on the 5th floor.

I don't think I want to take another overnight flight like that again, because I've felt sick through exhausation all day.  Although it was a first class seat, it is just a seat.

If I was to do a west-east overnight flight again, I'd fly San Francisco (or Los Angeles) to New York, because United treats those flights like the transatlantic flights and uses those planes with Polaris seating.

That would have been a much better experience with proper individual flat bed seats - and then I could still have taken the train to Baltimore, just heading the opposite direction.

Returning to the same stadium in consecutive years all feels very familiar.

I was ill last year, and I just hadn't noticed that the sponsor on the top of the scoreboard was no longer the Baltimore Sun newspaper, who had been the sponsor for over 30 years until last year.

It is reassuring to find that everything else is just the same as it ever was.

Of course, with the Giants being the visitors here, the game presentation is completely different: it's the Orioles players getting bigged up on the scoreboard as they come to bat, with the Giants players just a perfunctory introduction.

Just as I was still walking around the concourse to my seat, Mike Yastrzemski hit a home run to lead off the game - a lead for San Francisco!  In fact, it was more reminiscent of last Wednesday's clattering of the Brewers as San Francisco racked up a 10-0 win, much to the annoyance of the majority of the crowd!

I had excellent seats at an excellent price.  Even though the website showed that there were very few available, there were plenty of empty seats.  This is very frustrating, because it's season ticket holders are not reselling tickets for games they are not attending.  Some brief research shows that teams may be limiting ST holders in the number of games they are permitted to resell, which may explain it.

At least if they had marked them as not going to be used, I'd have been able to choose where to sit so I didn't have to sit directly next to anybody.

I was sitting next to Beatrice, an Orioles fan.  She showed me her MLB passport - which is a collectible pass book that you buy and then get stamped at each stadium you visit.  I'm going to look into getting one of these, although it's too late for this year.  They do say they can backdate stamp things - I'm not sure how many years they'll go back, though!

Baltimore arrival

Since the last time I flew into or out of Dulles, the new Silver Line extension has been completed!  That means you no longer need to take a bus/coach along to the end of the line and transfer to the train.  It all looks very new still.

I was able to reload my Smartrip smart card for the trip to Union Station, for my onward journey to Baltimore.  I boiught a a coffee at McDonald's, which seemed to take ages for them to make.  I caught the midday train.  It's really bizarre - they don't announce the platform/track for the train until the last minute, but have you queueing up along the concourse, back around corners, for miles.  Occasionally, people would come around the corner and ask "is this for [train number] 134??"  "Yes!" "Oh."

It doesn't take very long to get to Baltimore, but this time, I knew exactly where I was going when I got there.  So I got the free Purple Circulator bus down to a block away from my hotel.

I was able to get straight into my room at just after 2pm, and I went to sleep for a few hours straight away as I was feeling so tired.

Then I went out for some dinner, to McKormick and Schmick's - the same chain as the night before in San Francisco.  My dinner last night "only" cost $70, because I joined the Landry's Select Club a few years back and they give me a birthday reward that is available for 4 weeks starting from my "birthday", which I told them was 1st September so that I could always use the reward when I was in the USA!  It's $25 free that I might as well have.  The dinner tonight was about the same as I didn't have much.

I am still really tired, though, and I have to be up fairly early because the hotel stops serving breakfast at 9am!

It seems this hotel was a very old bank that's been converted into a hotel, possibly via being apartments at some point.  They retained some of the features, such as this (non-working) mail chute that runs from the top to the bottom of the building.  In the basement, they also have a meeting room called the Bank Vault.

Although there are occasional bits of peeling paint in places, it doesn't feel run-down like the Harborplace Renaissance that I stayed in last year.  It just feels old, and they are continually maintaining it, going by the smell of the wood treatments and what I suspect is paint, but thankfully not detectable inside my room.