Wednesday 17th October 2018 (updated)

We woke up to another glorious morning, but very chilly indeed. A sign that the seasons are changing.

We lay in bed while deciding what to do, and with nothing agreed or suggested even, Jools goes to investigate in the lobby of the hotel. Apparently the Baseball Hall of Fame and museum was about an hour away, and there was a brewery too in the town.

One of them win/win situations.

So, after breakfast we get in the car and program the sat nav to take us to Cooperstown.

The sat nav clearly is getting bored, so takes us via side roads and mountain tracks the 60 miles until we enter the quiet town. We start on wide main roads that sweep through picturesque villages strung out along the highway, fields with attractive red barns set in the grass. All nicey nicey.

The onto smaller and smaller side roads, under an interstate and across railroad tracks, that had no trains running, and none in sight no matter how slowly I drove over the crossing.

Over one final hill, and down a steep tree-lined road into Cooperstown, which seemed too small to have something so grand as the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, some mistake? But no, on the wide main street, there was the museum.

And thanks to a mistake Cooperstown is now baseball central, as not only is the hall of Fame Museum there, but there are two or three bat shops, many mechanising shops and other related places.

I like baseball, and know little of its history, so it was an eye opener for me, but three floors was perhaps a little too much. I watched the game first whilst on det in the US in 1996 and 1999, and the first aim was to see an actual home run. Fast forward to 2003, and I was on holiday in New England, walk into a restaurant in Rockport to find all the staff running out to look at the TV as the Red Sox and Yankee’s bullpens were fighting with each other in their league playoff game.

I was in Boston that trip too, as the Red Sox fought to level the series to three games each, and in order to watch the seventh game, I had to get a taxi to Gloucester to a bar as Rockport was a dry town back then. The Red Sox lost that game, but would prevail the next year.

Thing is I thought that football (soccer) had the monopoly in being passionate about sport, but to be in Boston during playoffs against the Yankees it was easy to get caught up in the excitement.

I also learned then about the infamous “curse of the bambino”, said upon his trade from the Red Sox to the Yankees, Babe Ruth said the Sox would never win another World Series, and indeed they didn’t. I learned the Sox had come close a few times to winning, sometimes managing to lose the World Series from apparently impossible positions. They did triumph in 2004, coming back from 3-0 down in the ALCS series to win 4-3, then win the World series 4-0, thus becoming the first team to win eight post season games in a row.

That’s the way to beat the curse!

Ruth is an interesting character and story, and a story lost in legend. But he did most of what was claimed, and I learned today he wasn’t just a slugger, but a great pitcher too. Just not a nice guy.

The museum is great, I mean really well done, and a shrine to America’s Pastime, with a window on a lost world of wooden stadium, spitballers, sluggers and racially segregated sport.

I looked at the Babe Ruth display and left. On the ground floor is the Hall of Fame, where the greats of the game have a plaque and a brass representation of their face. It was like a church, and people went to worship. I appreciated it, but most of the names meant nothing to me, so I left.

We go to a corner café to have lunch, a bowl of chili for me, which might have been the best chili I have ever tasted.

I snap the Main Street, and with the rain starting to fall, we decide to head home. And the sat nav took us down even more obscure roads and tracks, taking us over the tops of wooded hills and mountains rather than round them. We were going to go to the “world’s largest kaleidoscope” but really this was an excuse for something to do, and something we probably could do with not going to see. So we go back to the hotel for a coffee, and a relaxing afternoon. While outside hail and then wet snow began to fall.

Seriously.

We feasted on frozen pizza and Boston beans that night, and tried to reduce the stock of booze we had accumulated, whilst outside there was a lot of weather, with rain hammering down for a while.