A Life Of We: Cooperstown U. S. A. Part II

Sunday morning in Cooperstown....cold, gray, almost raining. Let's call it misty. We got free hotel breakfast. I piled eggs on my plate. I then threw them in the garbage because I'm pretty sure they were made of plastic. I ate a banana, yogurt, and then a biscuit. Mmmm, it was a good biscuit. Eddie had two of them and some bread. Anthony had French toast that was sitting with the other bread so we didn't realize it was French toast until he tasted it. He, too, had a biscuit. The biscuits? Were the best part of the hotel.

Coming in a second close as the favorite part of the hotel was the clean remote.

Apparently, these remotes are for hotels because they are easier to clean because they don't have nooks and crannies that store the bacteria of all the germy hotel guests.

We headed out early in the cold and mist downtown. On the way, we saw bicycles whizzing past in the opposite direction. One after the other and then some in packs. My brother said he would have ridden if he'd known about it. I was like, in the cold and rain when we have only a day to see the Hall of Fame? His regret faded, but he did say it was nice weather to ride because when you ride, you don't feel the cold. Eddie agreed. I remain unconvinced.

We parked a bit up the street from the Hall of Fame so we could avoid having to feed the broken meters. We'd found the street when we were driving around town looking for things to take pictures of. We found this statue and took pictures.

When we made it down the hill, we had to wait for bike traffic. Cyclists went past and people on the other side of the street cheered for them. We just wanted to get across. Finally, since the police woman at the crossing didn't seem to want to wave us across, Eddie stepped out and took charge. We noted that the cheering people were wearing shorts. One was in flip flops. Upstate people don't understand what summer is.

We were the first to arrive at the Hall of Fame. I had imagined there'd be a line outside. Nope. Empty. It was a few minutes before opening and we were running around taking pictures.

Then we went inside. It was heated! So warm. So cozy. The doors opened and we all filed in. The woman who opened the doors saw our tickets we'd gotten from the art museum and was like, Oh follow me, and we went to the head of the line, got our hands stamped, and we were in!

First, let me tangent into the devolution of a hand stamp. I think because I moisturize my hands so much, stamps don't take to my skin very well. Here's what happened to my hand:


It didn't even start out right. It's a bat, ball, and mitt, but mine is a bat, ball, and smudge.


Bat, ball, and mitt, all smudged up real good.

Anyway, the first thing we got excited about was a cow.

The next thing we got excited about was a bat guitar.

Then we were excited about this statue.

Now, when I say "we," I'm including myself only in the statement about the cow. I don't get excited about baseball. I did enjoy the Art Of Baseball.

I did enjoy the rest of the museum, but probably not as much as the boys did. I found a lot of it interesting. My brother read a lot. He'd planned on reading every word but then kept saying, It's impossible to read everything! I told him to take more pictures, and he was like, I can't take a picture of everything! Tell that to Eddie, who pretty much took a picture of everything. He has about three hundred pictures. I'm not exaggerating. We also found every button to push, door to open, and wheel to spin. Anything we could get interactive with, we did. Also, any places we felt should be interactive, we made so.

As in, we began on the third floor (not knowing we were supposed to start on the second, but it worked out better since we had the third floor to ourselves as everyone else was a floor below). We got interactive with the papier mache fans.

We pressed buttons to listen to a bunch of renditions of Take Me Out To The Ball Game. The one by Carly Simon was about eighteen minutes long, and there was no way to stop it. Then we played New York, New York on a loop by returning to the station and pressing the button for it as we looked at all the stuff. Next up, Hank Aaron Gallery.

Not much actually happened while we were here, so we can let the pictures speak for themselves.

Once we finished the third floor, we went to the second and realized, hey, we were supposed to start here and watch this film. So we got on line and watched the film. It was quick and informative, and we got to sing Take Me Out To The Ball Game at the end of it. The theatre wasn't full, however, so the singing was rather lackluster.

Find me in this picture!

I spent a lot of my time looping back around to see what the boys were reading or taking pictures of. I watched Who's On First on a loop for a while. Then I took to amusing myself by photobombing Eddie's pictures. We got to the actual Hall of Fame where all the plaques are, and that was pretty breath-taking. Eventually, we went to lunch--had really really really good pizza--hit some shops, and returned to the Hall of Fame so my brother could read more stuff.

PHOTOBOMB!

The very nice museum work man asked if we'd like to both be in it and made sure it was a nice picture.

Eddie on the Hall of Fame wall

We found much joy in the kids' room of the museum.

Something for writers!

The sun came out for a while. Eddie got ice cream. I found other ways to amuse myself.

When we'd finished every word, picture, piece of memorabilia, we headed out of the Hall of Fame.

We grabbed dinner at the Back Alley Grill. The guy who seated us was super nice, taking time to explain about what they had in their kitchen and what they didn't, and what they could supplement, and all we had to do was ask. Eddie commented, I love coming to places where the people are nice. Then we didn't get our order taken for about half an hour while the servers helped people who had come in after us. So much for that. The server who must have been in charge came over and said she'd take care of us, and then we had our food soon enough. I had soup. It was good soup. It was nice to have soup after another cold day. The sun had come out, but the wind was still there, the chill lingering. A nice way to kick off summer.

Oh! We also went to the wax museum. We had laughed about going, wondering why would anyone go there. Then we found ourselves strangely drawn to it. It was scary in many ways. First, it's the kind of thing I'm scared of right off the bat (ha! bat! I pun. I pun). Second, the wax figures were jacked up. The only one that actually looked like whom it was supposed to look like was George Costanza from Seinfeld, and he isn't even a ball player. They had Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, and the Marilyn was so bad (she looked like Madonna on crack), I couldn't even take a picture to make fun of it. Still, we found ways to have a good time. My brother figured that the wax museum was really a grand scheme to push for players to get into the Hall of Fame since they had Pete Rose and some other person who isn't in the Hall because of controversy. They also had Kevin Costner.