Day 4- Chicago part 1

May 18^th, 2013

Chicago- Day 1

Sure- take forever at the booth...

This morning, we woke up bright and early- the middle of the night, as I like to call it- 4:45am. Yeah, I wasn’t kidding.  That is central time for all of you in California who thinks that isn’t early enough.  YOU WOULD BE WAKING UP AT 2:45!!! Yeah, don’t think so.  That is early. We packed the cars up in the rain with light provided by lightning bolts in the distance and found ourselves on the road to Chicago by 5:06.  We passed into Wisconsin (Home of the Packers…), got some gas, and headed towards Madison and then continued into Illinois.  Once we got into greater Chicago, Traffic hit pretty good.  Ha- the least favorite point was when we were in line for a tollbooth and the car in front of us decided to ask for directions…. We sat there for 2-3 minutes while the booth attendant and the driver in front of us chatted it up… DON’T YOU KNOW WE HAVE A GAME TO GET TO?!

Wrigley Field

     We found parking a few miles from the stadium that came with a direct bus to the game.  We made it to the stadium at about 12:40, which wasn’t too bad considering we had made a 7 hours drive for a 12:05 first pitch.   I LOVED it as soon as we walked into the stadium.  We walked up a tunnel right behind home plate and made our way to our seats from there.  Our seats were down the sideline in left field, in the upper deck.  But the stadium isn’t very tall and makes everyone feel like they are right on top of the field.  So we loved it.  Only a few batters after we got to our seats, a ball came flying in our direction and a college-aged guy just 3 rows in front of us let it hit him hard in the leg, picked it up, and everyone around gave him a high five.  Wait, what?! He gets high-fives for not catching the ball?! What happened to the days where you catch it to earn your fives and applause.... Sigh. oh well.

Traditional left field picture

     Taylor and Hayley had seats elsewhere, but they joined us for a bit before we headed down to around where they had tickets.  We sat in the very back/front corner of downstairs, 2 rows behind the foul pole, straight down the line.  Cool spot.  When we tried to do our ball park tour, they wouldn’t let us into the bleachers without tickets for the bleachers.  What a joke.  Haha- worst seats in the house and we needed tickets.  On the other hand, we then headed to behind the plate and snuck in without a question.  Well, there was a question, but not from security.

The seats we watched the end of the game from

     We found some prime seats and plopped down, straight off the end of the first base line, and before 5 seconds had passed, grumpy behind us started complaining.  “These aren’t your seats!  You can sit here! I can’t even see the field anymore!!! These are my season tickets and I paid for these. You can’t just come in and sit here.” Blah. Blah Blah.  I let him rant for a few seconds, and then I decided I would take my turn.  This is where the hashtag owned is gonna come in.  I turned around and in my most polite voice I struck up conversation with him.  I said, “Oh, so you have season tickets here? That’s so cool.  How long have you been coming to the park?  We are from out of town and love it here!”  He didn’t even bother to answer my sincere question of how long he has been coming down.  He just said, “Ok, you can stay here I guess.”  Boom #owned.  Haha I was obviously hoping to calm him down and get him to where he would let us stay here, but I figured it would take longer than that! Haha I guess he realized 2 innings of having people in front of him wouldn’t be so bad, especially since we were from far away, visiting his precious Wrigley, cheering for his Cubs.

     We enjoyed the rest of the game from here, but at the cost of enduring endless conversation from the slightly drunk man who so graciously allowed us to stay in his section.  I asked him at one point, “So we have two days in Chicago, what should we do?”  He insisted that we visit Navy Pier- probably like 10 times, no exaggeration.  He had no other suggestions.  His wife started to suggest going to a museum before he hushed her saying, “It’s gonna be 85 degrees tomorrow! They don’t want to be inside.  They wanna be outside!” then turning to us, “Go to Navy Pier”.  They also added it was an all day event.

Garrett got this picture while we were being yelled at

     Anyways, after he tried on my glove, talked to us a lot more, etc, the game finally ended. The Cubs won 8-2.  It was actually a really fun game.  I ran down to the dugout, then we took our picture right behind the plate.  We then headed to the outfield to take a centerfield picture, since we were not able to during the game, and of course, they wouldn’t let us in.  The yelled a few times that the ballpark was closed and we couldn’t go to the bleachers. Blah blah blah. We tried a few different places and were able to manage 2 pictures, but no group picture.  Oh well.  We headed out, took a picture in front of the park, and boarded our crowded bus back to the car.  We went and grabbed lunch at Wendy’s/ Subway/ some other sandwich shop, and then just chilled in a park— laid there in the shade, threw a baseball a bit, and then we climbed back into the cars and headed up north to where we are staying here in Chicago and made it there around 7:00.

     We are staying with the parents of a mission buddy of mine and a companion of Garrett’s, Peter Bourgeois.  They are the nicest people in the world.  We have been so lucky to be able to have good friends who have parents all over that are willing to let us stay with them.  They gave us a choice on what beds to sleep in, told everything we needed to know, showed us where the piano and gym are, gave us a house key, and explained how to use the security system, etc.  no messing around.  They are great.  They had popcorn for us to eat, but we never did end up popping it.  We were all pretty tired after waking up at 5, so we didn’t stay up too long.

Stats:

Miles Traveled today: 450

Hours in the car today: 8

Miles traveled total: 1785

Hours in the car total: 30.5

Narcotic searches: 2

Jumbotrons: 1

Scoreboard*:

Garrett 2-0

Eric 1-1

Hayley 1-1

Mitch 1-1

Taylor 1-1

*we make predictions before each game about who will win and what the score will be and keep tabs on if we were right or not.

Funny quotes:

-Garrett asked a lady at one of the tollbooths if we get a discount on the toll for dealing with all the construction, to which she wittily responded, that’s actually what you are paying for.  Later at another booth, Garrett asked the man “why are they called freeways if we have to pay?” and the man who obviously didn’t understand said, “Only 2 more years!” haha

Classic- in front of the stadium

the classic live singing of Take Me out to the Ballgame from the box

The 4 guys and the Ivy wall