My Trip to Happy Hadlock

So, as you know, I took a trip up to Portland last week to see my two favorite minor league teams play each other…the Portland Sea Dogs vs. the New Hampshire Fisher Cats.  Since I like both teams pretty much equally, it was cool that the ‘Cats won on Tuesday night, and the ‘Dogs won on Wednesday.

In case you have never been to Hadlock Field, this is what the main entrance looks like.  Click image for bigger, will open in new tab/window.

Not much has changed there since last year.  The prices of stuff all seem to be about the same.  A good microbrew like Shipyard or Geary’s is five bucks, swill (Bud and Bud Lite) is $4.50.  Although I didn’t eat anything, since I’d eaten prior to the games, I looked and the food prices seemed to be about the same, as well.

I had bought the same seat for both games.  This is the view from it:

A bit higher up than I would have liked, but it was the best seat that they had that was on an aisle.  I never go to a game unless I am sure I can get an aisle seat.  When I gotta go, I gotta go, and the cooperation of people moving to let me out is always in inverse proportion to how badly I gotta go.  More on that in a bit.

One of my pet peeves about minor league games is that there is a lot of bad, very bad, singing of the National Anthem.  Many times it is downright painful to here, so painful that Francis Scott Key is probably spinning in his grave.  Both nights I was there, they had groups of little school kids performing it.  The Tuesday night group was absolutely horrendous.  The kids on Wednesday were a bit better, though.

Now, back to the thing about aisle seats.  I already explained why I always get one.  But answer me this…is it MY problem when someone wants MY aisle seat, and I don’t want to give it to her?

On Tuesday night, there was this couple sitting right next to me.  The wife was as big as a house.  Yes, this does factor into my rant here, hang on.  Anyhoo, after I arrived, they got up to get food.  When they returned, the wife informed me that she and her husband discussed it, and they decided that I needed to switch seats with them, so she could be on the aisle.  That would put me on the thrist seat in.  The reason being…she was pregnant and would need to get up and pee a lot.

I was in for it now.  I didn’t think she was pregnant, I honestly thought she was just very heavy, because she was large all over.  But I knew that if I agreed to the seat change, next thing you’d know, she’d decide she was too pregnant to get up and move when I needed to get past.  She sounded so smug and entitlement-minded, that I somehow knew I’d pee my pants and make a spectacle of myself if I agreed to the seat change.  And going out the other end of the row was not an option, as there was just a fence at that end, no way out.

And the fact was that I just didn’t want to give up that seat.  It was mine, I went out of my way to get that aisle seat.  What’s that saying…”Your lack of planning is not my emergency”.  If it was that important for her to have an aisle seat, they should have planned ahead.  So what if I wanted it because I was planning on drinking beer and would need to go a lot?  That is MY choice, just as it was HER choice to get pregnant and them come to a game.  I just plan things better than she does, so I get what I want.  I don’t go around demanding stuff from other people.

But after I refused, they both kept kind of glaring at me and making me feel uncomfortable for even daring to exist.  I was there to enjoy the game.  Fortunately, it may have been American Idol that came to my rescue.

Apparently, this game was supposed to be almost sold out, at least according to the seating chart on the Sea Dogs website where I so carefully chose my aisle seat tickets.  But many, many people didn’t show up at all, and I saw many, many empty seats.  Part of it may have been because it was a bit cold, but I think it was mostly because the first Idol finals show was on that night, and people opted to stay home to watch that.  There were enough empty seats, many on the aisle, where if I went and took one, and the real ticket holders came, I could just move somewhere else.  And it was not as if I’d bought a six-buck General Admission ticket and moved to a more expensive seat, this was a nine-buck box seat.

So, when it was time for the next bathroom/beer run, I got up, left, and did not return to that seat.  I went and sat in an eight-buck seat that was actually much closer to the restroom (go figure!) and was able to enjoy the rest of the game without being glared at and judged because I chose to do something so frivolous at a ball game as drink beer.  The only thing that bothers me is that Ms. Smug thinks she won, and will continue to be entitlement-minded wherever she goes.  But I got over it.

The weather for Wednesday night’s game was much warmer.  And this time, I got to sit in my seat for the entire game.  Seated in the row this time was a group of twenty-something couples, and none of them demanded to sit in my seat.  They were actually very nice, not annoying at all.

When I heard that the weather was to be even nicer for the Thursday afternoon game, I wished I could go to that, too.  But I had to check out of the hotel by 11AM, and I had a train reservation for 12:50PM.  I could probably have changed the train reservation with no problem…but then what would I do with my luggage?  I suppose I could have asked the hotel to hold it for me until after the game, I would have even paid them to do so.

But I didn’t, and now I wish I had.  Because now I think I know how I got sick…not the swine flu…but likely, a relatively mild case of food poisoning.  I mean, the swine flu is not something that goes away within three days.  But a mild bout of food poisoning would, especially if you’re otherwise pretty healthy and have a decent enough immune system.

And I think I know exactly where it came from…the clam chowder on the Amtrak DownEaster that I had on the ride home.  I was hungry and it was the first thing I’d had to eat all day.  It tasted fine, but for some reason, something didn’t seem right, and I couldn’t finish it.  So I tossed the rest of it.  And BAM!  A day later, I’m sick!

If I ride that train again, I need to either eat before I go, or study some diet pill reviews ahead of time so I won’t WANT to eat on the train.  Do they keep the fridge cold enough on those trains, anyway?  That might have been the problem.

But maybe if I’d gone to the game, eaten there, and taken a later train and skipped the chowder, I’d not spent two days gacking my brains out.

Anyway, it was still a very fun trip, and I am glad I went.  Especially now that I am back to putting up with the usual whiney *poor me* misery on the home front.

Yep, it was well worth it!