Weekend in Maryland - Baseball!

Yep, so as I mentioned in my last post, the main objective of our trip to Maryland this weekend was to see the Mariners beat the Orioles. But the baseball part of our trip started long before we got to Maryland. Along our way to Maryland, we took a side trip through Pennsylvania, and drove through Philly on I-95. We didn't really feel like stopping, but Kenji managed to get this shot of Phillies Stadium (do they even call it that? I mean, shouldn't it be named for some corporation or something?). If you click on the photo, you can see the full-size image:

But that was Friday. The game we went to wasn't until Saturday afternoon, and it was in Baltimore. We left Chesapeake City probably around 10:00am, so we had plenty of time to kill along the way. We stopped in Havre de Grace, which is where Cal Ripken is from. My mommy likes lighthouses, so we took this picture for her benefit:

Originally we thought we would stay in Havre de Grace, but then the bed and breakfasts that we call there were already booked up. Serves us right for making plans at the last minute. But it worked out, as I think I liked Chesapeake City even better.

So anyway, back to baseball. We don't really know our way around Baltimore, and the map we had of Maryland was the "Scenic Byways of Maryland" map. What that means is all the roads we didn't need to know were on the map, and all the roads we did need weren't. In fact, the space where Baltimore should have been was covered by a big white square.

Fortunately, we managed to guess our way to Camden Yards pretty well, but parking was another story. To make a long story short, after missing the Camden Yards entrance on our first attemp to park, and then driving out of the stadium grounds by mistake in our second attempt, we decided to make use of off-site stadium parking. Which means we parked way on the other side of the Ravens' football stadium. You can see the football stadium on the left in the distance in this picture, taken from the top of the upper deck seats behind home plate in Camden Yards:

Oriole Park at Camden Yards is a nice stadium. The end of Eutaw Street is pretty much part of the park, running alongside the stadium behind the outfield. Along Eutaw Street you can see little baseball-shaped plaques like these that indicate where home runs have been hit and by whom.
Saturday was also the day that they were giving away little cows to the first 10,000 fans to enter the park. We started off with just two cows, but then Kenji found another that was abandoned by someone else.

By the end of the game, we came across two more deserted cows. One we gave to our friends who showed up for the game in the second inning, and the other we kept so that we could make a barbershop cow quartet.

Of course, I had to have my picture taken with the biggest cow of them all!

Of course one of the cows wanted to have his picture taken with the ball field in the background.

And a closeup of the cool scoreboard:

Of course I had to take a picture of the field with players on it...

And our new favorite catcher at bat - Kenji Johjima. We missed him the last time when we went to the Mariners/Red Sox game because he didn't play.

Anyway, we did accomplish what we set out to do, though it looked really grim for the first four innings. Before we knew it, the Mariners were down 4-0. But by the sixth inning it was a whole different ball game. The Orioles started to make a comeback, but the Mariners managed to stay on top and in the end they won 8-6.