The Legends Club is very nice. You get an at-seat service throughout the game, although I didn’t actually use it. The seats are very comfortable too. I was actually in the wheelchair row at the back of section L. This is much better than being in a normal row, because they don’t have fixed seating - they just put free-standing seats out with a lot of gap between them, so there’s plenty of space. Also, you’re right next to the door into the club area, so you can pop in quickly whenever you like, without disturbing anybody else. I only had a helmet sundae to eat this evening, so now have a mini Twins helmet to add to my collection.

This was the finale of a series with the Twins looking for a sweep. Scott Baker was going for the Twins against Justin Verlander for the Tigers. Verlander really does throw it hard, although he had to throw a lot of pitches early and was almost knocked out of the game. Baker lasted only two innings himself, leaving with pain in his arm, which is a worry for the Twins.

This is the inaugural season for Target Field, and it is an impressive building - in my opinion, more impressive than the new Yankee Stadium. It’s not built from traditional red bricks, but from locally obtained limestone. The yellow stone look gives the stadium a very classy look. This is complemented with the old-style scoreboard - but done electronically. The big scoreboard screen in left centre looks great (as does the one in Yankee Stadium), but this stadium has a view of the downtown skyline. The yellow and green colour style contrasts nicely with the teams dark blue colours with red & white splashes. Any other team looking at having a new stadium would do well to see what the Twins have here - it really is beautiful.

The atmosphere here was totally different to how it was in New York. The crowd were into the game in a big way. The stadium was full, and it did get noisy - and there was a pre-season Vikings game going on on the other side of downtown, which didn’t hit the attendance at all. The two teams traded runs through the game, although it looked like the Twins had finally secured a decisive 4-run advantage late in the game until the Tigers staged a come back, led by two solo homers from Raburn & Inge (both pinch-hitting). The Twins hit back to take the lead again, but the Tigers tied it in the 9th taking us to extra innings. The evening was beginning to cool off by this point, as we passed 10pm. The Tigers finally scored a run in the top of the 11th inning to take a 9-8 lead, only for the Twins to take advantage of sloppy Detroit fielding in the bottom of the 11th to scrape it back again. The game finally ended just before midnight when Detroit’s closer Valverde shut down the Twins in the bottom of the 13th, after Detroit had scored once in the top of the 13th. It was quite chilly by this point - but a welcome change from New York.

Another game, another ejection too! Joe West, the 2nd base umpire and crew chief, had an action-packed game. Two blown calls, and one that was very close but that which went against the home team. It was the second blown call that brought Twins manager Ron Gardenhire out to argue, to lots of cheers from the crowd. A lot of in-the-face shouting and finger pointing then ensued, until West ejected him, at which point the crowd cheered him even louder as the argument continued. Eventually, he made his way back to the dugout, kicking at the grass, the dirt, and still shouting, but he went and sat down in the dugout again. The umpires reminded him that he had to leave the dugout and return to the clubhouse after being ejected, which set him off again, throwing things out of the dugout, including a ball and a towel, before finally leaving.

Whilst in New York, I tried to buy tickets for the Twins games over the phone. Unfortunately, this was unsuccessful just like buying the tickets on the website. The man didn’t appear to be able to understand what I was saying, but after we’d struggled through what sounded like the same form that I had failed to fill in on the website, he also found that the credit card was rejected, which didn’t bode well. I had to leave the hotel at 7am this morning, even though the flight wasn’t until 11.35 because the hotel shuttle only leaves hourly and leaving at 8am would have been too late, due to an odd 45-minute gap in NJ Transit trains out to Newark. Despite joining the E train only one station from the start of the line, it was the rush hour and I didn’t get a seat and the journey to 34th St Penn Station seemed to take forever. Needless to say it was very hot again, and only slightly less hot on the train. In retrospect, I should have got off the train or not got on it in the first place and taken a train the other way up to the terminus and started with a seat.

The train out of Penn Station, just before 9am, was fairly empty, as you’d expect, as it’s going the ‘wrong way’ for the rush hour. Fortunately, it appears I don’t have to pay the $25 baggage fee on any of my internal flights, as I had feared. I don’t know whether this is because it is an international itinerary (which has usually been sufficient in the past for them to waive the fee) or because I’d had a BusinessFirst flight in my itinerary. Whichever way, it is a welcome saving of $150! I was able to sit quietly and cool down and have breakfast when I got to the airport. Fortunately, there were lots of food outlets near the gate so I could have a coffee and sausage on toast.

The flight to Minneapolis left on time and was a bit bumpy at various points. I had a single seat, so it was both an aisle and a window seat, rather than being in the pairs on the other side of the aisle. I decided to have lunch at the airport before collecting my baggage, as I thought it would take some time to come out. When I got there, the conveyor had already stopped and the remaining bags, mine included, had been placed together next to the airline’s office.

It is much cooler here - only in the 70s. I took the metro rail service to downtown Minneapolis and walked the two blocks to the hotel. I have a huge room here at the Marriott. I also received a loyalty voucher with a choice of 1 day free Internet access, 5 Buffalo wings, 1 draft beer or 250 Marriott reward points. I chose the $14.95 value Internet access, even though I think they have a nerve charging that much for it. In fact, that’s the only problem with this hotel: everything’s chargable. Some things are a little odd: drinks glasses made of glass; coffee cup polystyrene. A small straw to stir coffee, HD television and more ways to connect your laptop to display on it.

As it was around 3.30pm by the time I was settled in, I decided to go to Target Field to see if I could buy tickets for tonight’s game. I couldn’t work out whether or not I could use my metro ticket again (it was still within the 2.5 hour validity limit - but can you make multiple trips?) but as I was wondering, I looked up and could see the stadium only 3 blocks away anyway, so I walked up there instead. It was threatening to rain as I left, some light spitting, but then it cleared up and the sun game out. After circling the place once looking for the open ticket window, I found it. The man there was able to offer me a seat in the Legends Club (not available only) and a ticket for Friday (I chose to go in the lower section rather than the Legends Club again, but now I wish I’d taken him up on the offer), but confirmed that they had nothing left at all for Saturday. The Legends Club tickets were only $2 more than the other tickets.

Then the moment of truth arrived: an attempt to pay by credit card. Earlier in the day, I’d taken out another $100 in cash, so I had plenty in case I had to resort to paying by cash. However, this time the transaction went through with no trouble at all. The added benefit of buying in person at the stadium: no convenience fees, additional charges, or anything extra.

I returned to the hotel for a quick dinner (another $18 - for a salad!) and then went the stadium for the 7.10pm start.

Wednesday was my first full day in New York. I decided to go and see how the World Trade Center rebuild project was going, so I took the hotel shuttle to the AirTrain, and got on the E train to the end of the line in southern Manhattan. The whole area is a building site still, as you would expect, but it is all a lot more organised than it was the last time I visited a couple of years ago. They are planning to open the new memorial on September 11th next year - the 10th anniversary of the event itself. There is now a free exhibition that you can go in to look around to see the progress, the stories of people, and designs for the memorial. They have live webcams on which you can see the shape of the two new waterfall pools being constructed. It’s still hard to visualise the finished article, as obviously none of the 500 trees are in place yet.

It was 37C/98F today. I made my way back up Broadway graudally, going into shops every couple of blocks or so, just to cool down a little. I found all the mobile phone shops together on 5th Avenue, but of the 3, only T-Mobile do SIM cards for PAYG, and the woman there said I would be better off just using the free wi-fi around the cities as there was plenty of it. So I still don’t really have very good access to wi-fi for navigation - all the free wi-fi places seem to need you to visit a web page to accept the terms & conditions before allowing you to access anything, which is a pain in the neck when you just want to see a map. However, when it does work, it works nicely. This afternoon, I spent an hour or so in a Starbucks having an iced mocha coffee and using their network. I wrote some of the blog entry whilst I was sitting there.

This time, I took the B train up to Yankee Stadium which was surprisingly uncrowded - so much so, I thought that perhaps it was an express that wasn’t going to stop at the stadium, but it was the right train. This evening, I was up in level 3, without the in-seat service, but thankfully, high up enough to catch the breeze. It made everything tolerable (it was still 90F when the game ended!) The game was much tighter, although the crowd still appeared somewhat lacklustre in their support for the home team. In all the years I’ve been coming to the USA to watch baseball games, I don’t recall seeing many ejections, and tonight’s was a good one. Jorge Posada had had the day off until coming in to pinch-hit for the backup catcher in the 8th inning. After being called out on a third strike that looked like it over the batter’s box rather than the plate, he started arguing with the home plate umpire. Of course, as he knows, arguing balls & strikes is an automatic ejection, but he wanted to get his money’s worth. He was shouting at the umpire, finger pointing and then started drawing lines in the dirt with a bat to show where he thought the pitch was. Even when restrained by his manager, he was still finger-pointing and shouting and trying to get into the umpire’s face - it was quite funny to watch. The end result was that the Yankees had to use their third catcher for the 9th inning.

Yankees won by a run. They were lucky, I thought. A number of seeing-eye singles crept through the infield or just over the outstretched hands of the infielders, whereas the A’s were hitting them at the fielders every time. I did get to see Mariano Rivera save the game, though - he probably got the biggest reception of anybody except Derek Jeter. It is odd, but nice, to still here the late Bob Sheppard’s voice announcing Derek Jeter’s at-bats.

The new stadium is going to have to rebuild the mystique that the old, demolished stadium had. It will take time. The previous stadium was built in a time before the Yankees had won anything - this time, they already have done a lot of winning, and that has affected the ambience somewhat - a superiority complex, I’d say. Whilst that goes for the organisation and the fans and probably a few of the players (A-Rod, in particular), it doesn’t apply to the two main men: Jeter & Rivera. Both seem to me excellent examples of how professionals should behave.

Since it was only about an hour before the game, the 4 train up the east side was very crowded. Although the trains are airconditioned, they still get hot and stuffy although not as bad as the stations themselves.

My seat was on the back row of the lower level, so I had a good view of the action. However the heat was still intense even as we moved into the evening. Oakland just couldn’t catch a break. Three stolen bases for the Yankees in the first inning alone and they never really looked like losing the game. Unfortunately, this game seemed to drift aimlessly and slowly - perhaps the heat was getting to the players as well. Even with the occasional waft of the homemade fan, formerly a Yankees 2010 Game Schedule leaflet, by the girl next to me, there was no breeze at all. I left my seat after the 5th inning and saw the rest of the game on the outer edge of the concourse where there was a very occasional light breeze. In fact to avoid the crush on the subway, I left in the middle of the 8th inning.

My perceptions of the new stadium are that it’s still very new and shiny, but it doesn’t have the same atmosphere as the old place. The crowd were really flat and disinterested as far as I could tell - most of the crowd involvement stuff was ignored - e.g. trying to encourage clapping with two strikes on the batter, or trying to induce the crowd to make some noise. Maybe it was the heat. Or the one-sided scoreline.

The Yankees won, by a lot.

The day of my first game arrived with the temperature predicted to hit the high 90s. It did. Most of the day was taken up crossing the Hudson, though. Since I arrived late in the evening, I stayed one night in New Jersey last night before transferring to New York today. The trip always takes longer than you expect and this time it took over 4 hours door-to-door. However, the trip was easy enough.

My room is small, by normal hotel standards, but it is clean and tidy although the wireless LAN doesn’t quite reach my room. After reading some of the reviews of the other hotel I booked in New York, I’ve decided to rebook my second stay in New York to be at the same hotel, with a request for a room one floor lower and at the other end of the building (I walked about the hotel testing the strength of the network) The breakfast is rather basic - not even cereal. I’ll have to stock up on cereals as I go around the country so I’ve got enough to cover that stay.

The hotel runs a shuttle bus every hour to JFK Airport. I take that and go on the Airtrain to the subway station and then into Manhattan. I had trouble with it allowing me to buy multiple tickets on the same day, but it did let me buy a 10-trip ticket the next day (which halves the price of the trips), which will work about just about right.

I did get to turn left when I got on the plane.

When I contacted the airline to confirm the upgrade on the Sunday evening, they said they’d sort it out, but they managed to delete it altogether! So I phoned them again and I got a window seat (2F) next to a nice young American lady. The seat did indeed go flat, but I didn’t have it like that much. The dinner was served not long after take-off, starting with warm roasted nuts and another drink, then bread rolls/garlic bread with a mixed salad with vinaigrette. Next came the appetizer, which was morel mushroom soup accommpanied by seafood-filled pastry and lamb kebab with chutney. For the main course, I chose the tenderloin of beef with marsala sauce, carrots, sugarsnap peas and potato au gratin (other choices were roasted Peruvian chicken; Seafood Stew; and Pasta Bowl). The cheese course was next, but it tasted odd so I didn’t eat very much of the cheese - but they had some Cheddars biscuits. The dessert course was a very nice vanilla ice cream, with chocolate sauce. After that, coffee was served. I’m pleased I just sampled the free buffet at lounge, because I was considering having a proper dinner at one of the restaurants instead, but I’d never had managed everything on the plane if I had have done that. A couple of hours after dinner there was a wonderful baking smell wafting through the cabin, which turned out to be freshly baked cookies - they were very nice too.

I watched the 007 film (Tomorrow Never Dies) and played a couple of the games. As we chased the sun westwards, we had a magnificent sunset from deep red through yellow to light blue to dark blue.

We left the gate on time and then taxied around for half an hour but we arrived early, touching down just about 9.20pm local time. After a short taxi and a short walk, I was at immigration and despite having to do the procedure twice because the fingerprint scanner was dirty, that was very quick. My bag was one of the first out, with its bright orange “Priority” sticker. By 9.45pm I was through all the formalities and headed to the AirTrain station, and I was in my hotel room at 10.30pm on the dot, barely an hour after touching down.

It’s warm here - it was reportedly over 90F (32C) earlier this evening, but had cooled down to 84F (29C) by the time I arrived.

Travel to the airport was very smooth, although the journey down to Kings Cross took twice as long as usual due to engineering works, although it was good that I didn’t have to change train at all. The underground was quick and fortunately, the H&C underground platform comes out next to the Heathrow Express platforms! I bypassed the check-in queues to get my boarding pass and check bag in, and now I’m sitting in the lounge in Terminal 4 - right at the opposite end of the terminal to the gate the plane’s going to leave from! There’s a cold buffet here, with meats and cheeses, crisps, and coffee and cake. All free - except for the 20,000 airmiles that the upgrade cost me!

I’m now home, after a good flight back from Chicago to London Heathrow. We pushed back from the gate exactly on time, and arrived over London seven hours later, then did the usual trick of circling for a bit before landing 30 minutes later. I just caught a Heathrow Express and the underground was OK, but there are so many flights of steps with no sign of an escalator or lift.

Only 5% disc space left on my PVR, so I watched last week’s Strictly Come Dancing to clear enough space for more recordings, as I’m going to pop home for my birthday tomorrow.

The final game of my road trip was to see the first game of the Minnesota Twins visiting the Chicago White Sox. Unfortunately for the White Sox, it was more of the same ineffectiveness at the plate as they got shut out by the Twins 7-0. The Twins put runs on the board in 6 different innings, and the White Sox never really looked like they were going to do anything. After not really chatting to people much during the other games in Chicago, I had a long chat with a lifelong Chicagoan called Rita who was sitting next to me who was at the game with her daughter and husband. She was full of useful information and was interested to hear all about my roadtrip. Occasionally, a White Sox player got a base and got a brief ripple from the crowd, but there was more excitement in the pizza race (which the sausage-topped pizza won - sadly, this was a video screen event, not an on-field live-action one)

The Twins looked sharp and they are serious contenders for the AL Central. The White Sox appear to have a great many of the necessary pieces, but they’re just not fitting together right now. In his postgame press conference, which is shown on the big video screen after the game, which I think is a great thing to do, Ozzie didn’t really have much to say. It’s clear that he’s disappointed that things aren’t going well, but he was defending his star players tonight, in particular Jermaine Dye and Paul Konerko.

The game seemed to go very quickly, perhaps because we were engaged in doing something more interesting than watching the White Sox go down 1-2-3 in an inning again. After just over 2 and a half hours, quick by AL standards, the game was over and my roadtrip is over, and that’s quite sad, because I have to fly home tomorrow evening and go back to work on Monday. I could easily spend the entire season travelling around the US, watching games, staying in swanky hotels and eating in restaurants every night. Sadly, I just couldn’t afford it.

Ozzie’s press conference on the impressive main scoreboard:

One fan’s take on the situation:





(it reads: “Wait Till Next Year”)

On Monday afternoon, I went down to the Museum of Science & Industry and found that they had the brand new (well, it was brand new in April) Harry Potter exhibition on. It is closing next week and moving to Boston for a few months. Eventually, it’ll land in London, but Warner Bros is paying for it, so it’s starting in the United States, although somewhat oddly for an American museum, all the staff involved in it are either British people who have come over specifically to run the exhibit or are ex-pats who still possess a strong British accent. According to the ex-pat lady orginally from near Liverpool, this was something that JK Rowling herself had insisted upon, to maintain the whole atmosphere of the stories and films.

If you’re into Harry Potter, you’ll like it; if not, most of it won’t have any meaning for you. It’s packed with costumes and props from all the films, although the guide explained that some of the props have had to be given back temporarily sometimes as they need them for re-shooting some scenes from the final two films that are heading into post-production now. As you would expect, you’re not allowed to touch many of the things, but you can sit in Hagrid’s chair and you can try to get the quaffle through the hoop. The tour cost $13 plus $5 for the audio tour, which is probably worth the extra as there are lots of audio commentaries. There is no photography allowed whatsoever, though, except for the Ford Anglia in the museum’s entrance hall: