Travel: the US

I first saw a baseball game back in 1998, at the SkyDome in Toronto. It was, and still is, a multi-purpose stadium, used for rock concerts and all sorts. This versatility sapped the two-thirds-empty stadium of all personality. The experience was dire. It didn’t help that I had almost no clue as to what was happening. The home team, the Blue Jays, lost badly.

In 2004 I was boarding with a couple who happened to have ESPN. I was lucky enough to have the place to myself for a short time, and I couldn’t help but watch some of the (now famous) series between the Boston Red Sox and the Yankees. I couldn’t get over the Red Sox fans, how much it all meant to them, and how ridiculous their level of optimism was. Even if they miraculously came back to topple the Yankees, they still had another team to beat after that. And their supporters still believed they could do it. Which of course they did. The bloke who sat next to me on the train from Albany, NY to Toledo, Ohio (he wore a cap with a B on it, of course) happily gave me a play-by-play account of the oh-four series, including that steal.

The Red Sox struggled a bit in 2015; this made getting a ticket a bit easier. I went to the game against Kansas City on my second day in Boston, which had already been a fantastic day. I only just made it on time. Fenway Park is the oldest ground in the country, the smallest too in the major leagues, and I instantly fell in love with it. I was way back in the bleachers, but that hardly mattered. Oh wow, look at the Green Monster! And the manual scoreboard! I really like the scoreboard at the Basin, but this one is on a different level of coolness. It’s clearly hand-painted; the B’s in “At Bat”, “Ball” and “Boston” are all different (or maybe it’s a replica made from an original that was hand-painted; whatever). The scoreboard also shows the scores from matches taking place elsewhere (how come you never saw that at football matches in the UK?).

They played songs which people really got into, and there was the traditional organ music. That guy who plays the organ at Fenway, what a great job he has. There were the hot dog smells and sounds: “Hot dogs! Get your hot dogs!” I did get my hot dog and a warm Sam Adams from downstairs. Shit, did I really pay $15 for that? That’s $24 where I live. Amongst the sights, sounds and smells, there was a game going on. At least this time I knew what a double play or a stolen base was when I saw one. The Red Sox weren’t doing that well. By the middle of the sixth inning they were 5-0 down. But the crowd weren’t that bothered. It was a real party atmosphere. The names of the players got me as they flashed up on the screen. Mookie Betts. Xander Bogaerts. You have to have the right name to play baseball. The names were accompanied by a whole raft of stats. I now know what an ERA is. When we got to the bottom of the ninth, the crowd had thinned, but I was going to stay till the end no matter what. The Red Sox rallied quite strongly at the end, and there was some excitement when, trailing 6-3, they had the bases loaded with two outs. Just one big swipe for the sort of victory that kids probably dream about. There was one big swipe, but no heroics. The game was over. It took three and a half hours – the length of an average five-setter – and it just flew by. There was a wonderful bucket drummer outside and just so much joy. I haven’t seen that much live sport in my life, but that game would make my all-time top five. (The 2001 Wimbledon semis are way, way out in front.)

For interest’s sake I had a look to see how often someone has hit a walk-off grand slam home run to win by one. There are 2430 games in each regular season so in the history of baseball it must have happened a fair few times. It turns out it’s happened just 28 times total. And at Fenway, now in its second century? Zero. I could have seen history there! Never mind.

Some of the terminology in baseball is interesting. A “save” means something quite different from what I think it should mean. A “grand slam” is a very different feat from the similarly-named achievement in tennis or rugby, but at least that one makes sense to me. (I actually think of a grand slam as a sum of money, specifically $85, or one of each note that I ever see. Yes, I still use cash. I know.)

There’s something just nice about baseball. It moves at a pace that’s decidedly not 2015. For large parts of the game, not a lot happens. People have drawn parallels between baseball and Twenty20 cricket, but I’d say it’s more like Test cricket. Both sports work very well on the radio. You can listen to the commentary while doing something else, just like Dad might have tinkered under the bonnet of his car, with the baseball on in the background, in the fifties. Baseball also seems to attract interesting characters, such as Yogi Berra who died last month. Some of the stuff he came out with was pure genius. I tried to get some Yogi-isms into our last team meeting at work; I normally just sit there and say nothing.

Watching sport in Boston is extra fun because they have the best sports fans I’ve seen anywhere in the world. (Some people might use a different superlative from “best”, but I suppose I sort of am a Boston sports fan now.) I’d be on the T and two-thirds of the people in my carriage would be showing their support for one of the local teams, including me (I bought a Red Sox cap so I would fit in at the game, and wore it for the rest of my trip as a mascot, except in New York because I didn’t want to get beaten up). Support for the All Blacks, even during a World Cup like we have now, is small beer in comparison. I imagine the marathon bombing in 2013 “helped” unite the city and its sports teams. Baseball, like all major US sports, is highly commercialised. The Red Sox have an official motor oil, an official furniture store, an official hummus. Yep, official hummus. For some reason I found this hilarious.

While baseball has a lot of features I like, their football has all the elements in sport that I can’t stand, as if someone designed it just to annoy me (and it’s also dangerous). Saying that, I’d happily go to a Patriots game if someone bought me a ticket, for the experience. Basketball doesn’t really appeal to me either. Hockey though, that looks like enormous fun, and all the Bruins fans in the yellow-and-black and those huge B’s look wonderfully mad. Unfortunately hockey is a winter game and I don’t know if I’d go there at that time of year. But Boston, it’s such a beautiful city that I have to go back there some time, see at least three or four games at Fenway, and maybe get a bit closer to the action.

I thought I’d note a few other observations about the parts of the US that I saw (and even though I travelled a long way it still only felt like I scratched the surface).

I found the general American public to be extremely welcoming, friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to. People whose job it was to be friendly and helpful were sometimes extremely so, but sometimes very unhelpful and aggressive with it, and I got everything in between. As for service being much better at restaurants than in NZ, because staff rely so heavily on tips, I didn’t see that. You got more service certainly, but to call it better would be like saying LA has “better traffic” than Wellington. You got the impression that waiting staff felt they needed to perform for their tip; I thought this was demeaning.

US physical currency is nasty stuff. Thai baht is six times more user-friendly. Let me see, I’ve got some black stuff, and some more black stuff… and everything required far too much black stuff. The taxes that varied from state to state (both in amount and where they applied), having to tip all the time, and the ATMs that only ever gave out twenties when you really needed a range, often made transactions a bit of a rigmarole.

I saw this everywhere. It seemed that you either have manicured lawns and a Lexus, or you can’t feed your kids. There didn’t seem to be much of a middle. It’s very different to Wellington where lots of people drive a clapped-out car (but they have one), aren’t going anywhere in their jobs (but they have one), are able to go fishing or maybe play tennis, go to Australia or Fiji occasionally, access nutritious food, and see the doctor when they get sick. I was thinking, maybe that’s why they don’t allow ties in baseball (when it would make so much sense to me to allow them). In the US, people don’t tie in real life. I think the middle is shrinking in the UK too.

Baseball. I enjoyed that so much that I’m giving it its own post (coming up next).

The flight back was long and knackering. Boston to LA was 6 hours. Then I had 7½ hours in LA and was able to go to Santa Monica beach (an unexpected bonus) before getting on the plane to Auckland – another 12½ hours. Air NZ have crammed in more seats on those 777s in the last few years, and you basically can’t win no matter where you sit. Of course I still had to get to Wellington, where it was wet, windy and 7 degrees. In Boston it had been 29. That same day I got a haircut – my hair hadn’t been that long in 13 years. It was also 13 years since I’d been as happy as I was in Boston.

Surprisingly, people at work seemed genuinely interested in my trip. That was nice. I’ve been in touch with my cousin – she goes to Boston for work sometimes and her husband and the boys have all been there. If it wasn’t for her I doubt I’d have gone there, so I’m very grateful.

The organised tour, which ran from Chicago to New Orleans over ten days, was very well run. Our guide was exceptionally good. He knew all the history and always gave us maps and plenty of other information. If there was ever a hitch, he could come up with a plan at the last minute. I saw, heard and tasted a ton of stuff. But having to constantly be at certain places at certain times, and never staying more than two nights in any one place, became quite tiring. And there was this unwritten rule that you had to be there ages before, as I found out when I turned up at the coach four minutes before our scheduled departure and was quite unpopular. And I did feel out of place at times: most people were travelling with a partner, were about double my age, and were doing about their tenth tour. I’d give the tour a 9 out of 10 because it was really very good, but if there’s a next time I do one, they’ll have self-driving buses by then.

Gross generalisation, but Aussies and Kiwis are better travellers than Brits. They kind of accept that you might not be able to get a decent bowl of porridge in a hotel in Lafayette. (I mean, I like porridge as much as the next guy. I’ve had a bowl every day since I got back.) Brits seemed less willing to try new things or to adapt. Big generalisation as I say, but I think I’m being objective there.

Elvis was the big draw card for a lot of people on the tour. I get Elvis, I think, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one person’s face so many times in one day as when we went to Graceland. That got a bit much!

I enjoyed country music much more than I ever expected to, and the two shows we saw in Nashville were so much fun. It’s opened up a whole new world of music for me (and it’s a vast world) that to my shame I’d been almost totally ignorant of before. Those shows and all the bars with the live bands made Nashville my second favourite place on the whole trip. The second night we saw the Grand Ole Opry – the music there was absolutely awesome – just so much variety. That night was 9/11, so we saw even more overt patriotism than the rest of the time. Memphis was pretty cool too; I think I really liked that whole state of Tennessee. And isn’t that word just so evocative? Tennessee.

I got the sense that in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana and probably the rest of the south, the value placed on human life is smaller than elsewhere. I even saw that in New Orleans when three blokes were doing a manhole inspection in the middle of the road and there was virtually no traffic control. Katrina was absolutely devastating and heartbreaking, but had the same thing happened further up the country the death toll would have been far smaller.

People really do talk quite differently in the south; they really do say “y’all” all the time when talking to more than one person. In New Zealand “yous” is creeping in; this is nails-on-a-blackboard for some people but it does the same job as “y’all”.

I recently spent four weeks in America. It was the first time I’d visited the US, and my first overseas trip in five years.

My first port of call was Boston. I loved Boston. It gave me a feeling of happiness that has been all too rare and fleeting for me in the last what seems like forever. At times I was overwhelmed by how happy I was there, whether I was at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, or looking at the glass flowers at Harvard, or at Fenway Park, or eating a clam chowder, or having yet another Sam Adams (I did the brewery tour), or just on the subway with all the buskers… I went out to Cape Cod – a 90-minute trip on the fast ferry – and it was a glorious day for it. All my photos of Boston got nuked when I tried to copy them onto my cousin’s computer. This was quite upsetting because Boston made me happier than I’d been since probably 2002. (That in itself upset me because I’m talking about a normal level of happiness for a few days, not any sort of mania, and I should get to feel that more than once every 13 years, and not have to travel 9000 miles to feel it.) It felt great to land there a second time, and take that subway ride to my hostel which seemed so familiar, but then having to fly home after just one more full day there, gosh. I had eight days there by myself, and it was great having the time just to observe such a beautiful city, not having to think about where I need to be next and at what time. Boston will always be a special place to me now. I don’t think I could live there though – it ain’t cheap!

I saw my cousin and his Italian fiancée near Albany in upstate New York. Such a pretty part of the country. We did some tramping in the Adirondack mountains. When we got to the top of one of the many peaks there, it just felt great to be alive. I wish I’d done more of that kind of thing rather than seeing cities. I also saw Lake Placid which played host to two winter Olympics.

I loved travelling on the trains. I did three train trips: Boston to Albany (5 hours), New York to Chicago (21 hours!) and Memphis to Hammond, Louisiana, as part of a tour (7 hours) and they were all very enjoyable. The train from Memphis was a double-decker and had an observation car. They were as slow as anything but that didn’t matter. You get tons of leg room and it’s just so much more comfortable than a bus, let alone a plane.

The tennis was great, if a bit hot. I saw some really good matches over two days. I think I saw eleven hours of it on one day. So I’ve now been to all the grand slams and have achieved a goal! I’d say that the best match I saw was Gasquet against Kokkinakis. The Aussie led by two sets to one but retired with leg cramps in the fifth set and probably should have thrown in the towel earlier.

I realised that don’t like really big cities that much (I might have known that already, but this trip just confirmed it). New York just didn’t do it for me (the highlight of my time there was seeing Chicago, the musical, on Broadway). As for the city of Chicago, it definitely appealed to me, mainly because it looked absolutely stunning, but I didn’t spend long enough there to really get to know it. My hotel room was on the 11th floor and gave me a magnificent view of Lake Michigan. I hope I can go back to Chicago one day.