BIB2022: the Original Civil War Tour
Mark was the last of us to arrive - on Thursday morning, following a red-eye from the West Coast. Here’s a riddle. What has its roots in the 50’s and flies in the morning? Well, both Mark and the Honey Bee Diner, where we grabbed breakfast and planned our first action-packed day. There were plenty of airborne insects to be found in the mid-twentieth-century themed restaurant, but none of the killer, bumble, or queen variety, unless you count the mesmerizing giant Honey Bee sign on one wall that changed color every few seconds. Our first post-breakfast stop was a bust…the Frank Zappa Bust in Baltimore, to be more specific. Mark rolled out a brand-new red “Chunga’s Revenge” Zappa t-shirt for the occasion. For the uninitiated, Chunga’s Revenge was Frank’s third solo album, which has been around since 1970, just like the black Zappa t-shirt that Mark wore to so many prior BIB trips.
Next, we paid homage to BIB trips past by visiting the former site of Memorial Stadium, where we’d last attended an Orioles game in 1991, the last year that the team played there. It is now the site of a recreational baseball/football field with home plate being in the same exact location as it was when Memorial Stadium still stood. The field is surrounded by senior living facilities on one side and a playground, which presumably sees little use from its closest local residents, on the other.
Memorial Stadium was called “Babe Ruth Stadium” following Ruth’s death in August 1948 through late 1949, when it was permanently renamed to honor America’s war veterans. While completely irrelevant to our trip, this fact makes for a nice segue to our next stop at Babe Ruth’s birthplace, just a short walk from the Orioles’ new home at Camden Yards. Highlights included the room in which the Sultan of Swat was born on February 6, 1895 (when the Bambino really was a bambino) and a warped bat from the Babe’s 60 home run season that looks like something out of a XIAFLEX ad.
Three blocks away, we got to witness Mo Gaba Day at Oriole Park, a touching celebration of the 14-year-old blind Orioles superfan who lost his battle with cancer in 2020 and is now enshrined in the Orioles Hall of Fame just beyond the outfield wall, along Eutaw Street. His mother threw out the first pitch to Mo’s favorite player, Trey Mancini, who himself is a cancer survivor, having missed the entire 2020 season due to chemo treatments. It was only fitting that the Orioles won 3-0, due in part to an eighth inning routine fly ball to right that was lost in the sun by the Tampa Rays’ Josh Lowe. It glanced off his face and led to a two-run inside-the-park home run for designated hitter Mancini, the only one of his career. It earned Trey a curtain call at the end of the inning in what, with the trade deadline approaching, turned out to be his last home game in Baltimore. In his post-game comments, Mancini openly alluded to the possibility of some miraculous intervention from the day’s honoree. While the circumstances of a 12:35pm game time creating a torturous sun field in right may have been the real culprit on this day, it’s hard to deny that baseball could use a little less time between pitches and a little Mo Gaba.
The day game left us with the rare opportunity for a relaxing high-quality dinner at Philips Seafood in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and a stroll through the East Harbor area. On the way back to our hotel, frozen custard shakes started to sound good, and we’d seen just the place on our walk to dinner, the Shake Shack. It turns out, however, that the temperature of their shakes was matched by the pace of their service: glacial. Froth-like custard delivered by sloth-like staff.
Friday began with breakfast at The Trolley Stop, a restaurant in Ellicott City (part of the thriving Ellicott City/Catonsville metroplex) just dripping with history. The name comes from the fact that a trolley car stopped outside the second-floor dining room from 1889-1955, but the place has also served as a tavern, country inn, general store and boarding house over the years. The most distinguishing characteristics on the day we were there were a loud older guy (obviously a regular) at the table across from us and the presence of scrapple, a fried mush of pig parts, cornmeal, and spices, on the menu. Though this delicacy was unfamiliar to most of us, Kevin is a huge fan, as scrapple’s close cousin, goetta (substitute oatmeal for the cornmeal), is a favorite to go with most breakfast foods in Cincinnati, the erstwhile Porkopolis. Leave it to Kevin to select the appropriate swine pairing.
Next up was Antietam National Battlefield, site of the September 1862 Union victory that proved to be a key turning point in the Civil War. We climbed the 85-foot observation tower to get a 360-degree view of the surroundings, including the Sunken Road, also known as Bloody Lane, that lies almost directly beneath. Mark and Kevin also walked across the scenic Burnside Bridge, made of stone and sitting in a valley from which waves of Union soldiers had to overcome 500 Confederates firing from a nearby hillside. The Burnside Sycamore that witnessed the battle 160 years ago (not to be confused with Mark’s sideburns that witnessed his high school football battles over 50 years ago) still stands adjacent to the bridge.
Our next stop was the very picturesque, and very remote, Harpers’ Ferry National Park, whose most colorful historical figure would have to be John Brown, the abolitionist who tried to initiate a slave revolt in 1959 by raiding the armory in which the United States government stored firearms. Its second most colorful figure would probably be our waitress at the Coach House Bar and Grill (one of few spots that offered some shady respite from the 93-degree heat and oppressive humidity). None of us caught her name, but we did all note that she had a nose ring, tattoos of a skull and the words “The Good Times are Killing Me”, and a penchant for defacing national parks. That last tidbit was the result of naively asking her what someone does for fun growing up in Harper's Ferry. Harper’s Ferry sits at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the Potomac Rivers, the latter of which has a footbridge over it connecting West Virginia and Maryland. The footbridge also happens to be part of the Appalachian Trail. The paperback version of our baseball trip exploits will impress future readers with the remarkable shape we must have been in to have hiked the Appalachian Trail from West Virginia to Maryland and back, including two river crossings, in the hellish heat of late July 2022.
At some point, long after we had left Harper’s Ferry, Gerry realized that he had not retrieved his credit card from the Coach House and Grill. His call to the restaurant, particularly when asked which waitress we had, must have been precious: “well, I don’t know the name, but, uh…tattoos…blah blah…nose ring…blah blah…may have criminal record for vandalism…blah blah.
About 90 miles from Harper’s Ferry, we attempted to do a driving tour of the U.S Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD. There is no such thing, at least not without authorized credentials to enter the base. Strangely, being four grown men in a minivan who drive up to the guard’s gate with the stated intention of “checking out the place” does not constitute prima facie evidence of said credentials. What it does constitute is reason for the motorist to turn in his driver’s license while, in the words of the guard, “a proper turnaround”, including external inspection, is executed. Only guessing here, but had that not gone well, there’s a good chance the next step would have been an internal inspection, in which any one of us would have been executed.
With our attempt at an expedient driving tour thwarted, the alternative walking tour (and associated cavity search, one would assume) was out of the question, as Scott needed us to get on the road for a 6:35pm game between the Altoona Curve and the Bowie (Maryland) Baysox. Turns out the 6:35 game was actually a 7:05 game, for which we arrived a good deal of time before gates opened. Not like we had anywhere to go. Literally. After a good amount of time in the van, and a good amount to drink over that time, there was nowhere to go outside the stadium. When the Prince George’s Stadium turnstiles finally opened, a couple of us came charging through the turnstiles like Affirmed and Alydar out of their post positions at the 1978 Kentucky Derby. That was only the first of a couple of things we did like racehorses over the next 60 seconds. To be fair to Scott, his planning and driving were about as good on this trip as we’ve ever experienced. Just this one “wee” problem. Nevertheless, when Scott pondered how he could have gotten confused about the game time, we condescendingly suggested that in the future he abandon whatever myriad of information sources he’d been using (team website, conversations with front-office people, magic eight ball, Ouija board, etc.) and ask himself “What do the tickets say?”
The wait was well worth it once inside, as it turned out to be Navy night. That meant that the announced attendance of over 6500 was largely uniformed students and graduates of the Naval Academy, seated by class, including the 2022 class of new cadets, or “plebes”. Hard to say which was more stirring: their singing a full-throated Anchors Away during the post-game fireworks or an even more enthusiastic You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’, à la Top Gun, between innings. Luckily, an usher had warned us to hit the concessions before the game, as the plebes could not eat until after the National Anthem, but once they started, the chow line would become a reminder that “All Hands on Deck” was originally a nautical term.
It was also in Bowie that we met Susan and Clay Davenport. Somehow, we’d gotten into a discussion amongst ourselves about the absurd specificity of the documented technique for muddying a major league baseball before it is put in play (precise mud-to-water ratio, use of a humidor, etc.). Mr. Davenport, seated in front of us, jumped in and did us one better by pointing out that not just any mud is used, but that it must specifically be from a particular spot on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River. We fact-checked him online and probably should not have been surprised that a guy named Clay really knows his mud. He also accurately projected later in the game that a light rain would get no heavier and, sure enough, it stopped within 15 minutes. It turns out that in this little BIB-versus-Davenport nerdapalooza, ole’ Susan had brought a ringer. Clay is both a baseball sabermetrician (cofounder of Baseball Prospectus, best known for creating the Pythagenport Formula to find the best exponent for the Pythagoras winning percentage equation) and a meteorologist (employed for years by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, where he developed models for predicting rainfall from satellite imagery). By way of comparison, our bona fides were limited to a single Batavia Muckdogs game in 2006 where one guy (Gerry) served a stint as Zweigle’s Sausage King and one guy (Scott) managed to complete the spin-the-head-on-a-bat race without falling ass-over-teakettle onto the warning track (lookin’ at you, Kevin). As for the game itself, The Baysox fell to the Curve 6-4, as Bowie’s starter, returning from an elbow injury, gave up 5 runs and didn’t make it out of the first inning.
Saturday morning began with a trip to Jamestown, home of the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. One of the most popular attractions there is the harbor that contains recreations of the three ships that brought the first colonists to Virginia in 1607. They were named Susan Constant, Godspeed and Discovery, but after having boarded them and contemplated crossing the Atlantic in one of these tiny vessels, we are convinced they could just as easily have been called the Spewing Constantly, Porcelain Godspeed and Dysentery. Enough to make a guy start to contemplate the etymology of the word “colonist”.
Between Jamestown and Yorktown, we stopped for lunch at Old City Barbecue, which boasts sauces in three flavors: OC Vinegar, Stick Patches BBQ, and Tidewater Mustard (presumably not made with real tidewater). In addition to the bountiful selection of house sauces, there was an equally generous supply of houseflies. One possibility is that they stole the idea from the Honey Bee Diner, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was to faithfully replicate the dining experience of eighteenth-century colonial Williamsburg.
In 1781, Washington’s war-weary army marched hundreds of miles from their headquarters north of New York City to confront General Cornwallis at Yorktown. We drove 12 miles from Old City Barbeque in our minivan. The closest we got to experiencing the hardship and misery of a Revolutionary War soldier was in the air-conditioned experiential theater simulation of the Battle of Yorktown. Of course, we did have to walk a good 100 yards in the oppressive heat of late July to see a remarkably authentic re-enactment of a colonial-era cannon being fired. Oh, the agony.
Scott limited our time in Yorktown so that we could arrive comfortably ahead of the 7:05pm Fredericksburg Nationals game against the visiting Salem Red Sox. Somewhere along the way, however, Scott began to again question whether he had the game time correct. All together now, “Scott, what do the tickets say?” So…we arrived a little late for the 6:05pm game, due only in part to Scott’s chronological dyslexia. The bizarre parking arrangement for Virginia Credit Union Stadium, whereby it shares space with the Fredericksburg Expo and Conference Center, which happened to be packed on Saturday evening, left us with a 5K walk/run between minivan and ballfield. It was Christmas in July theme night, including players in ugly sweater jerseys, a giant inflatable Santa on the concourse down the left field line and, dressed in full Kriss Kringle garb beyond the left field wall, a real Santa who had to be sweating from his teeth. It was a 6-1 victory for the hometown Nats, in a game that took only 2 hours and eight minutes to play, a Christmas gift of a game that was wrapped up (see what we did there?) by a little after 8pm. That left time for a post-game drink if we could locate a downtown sports lounge. We did: Jay’s Downtown Sports Lounge. The waitress may or may not have been blond, but she gave the most blond answer of all time when we asked what was on tap: “I’m not sure. They change them all the time.”
After breakfast Sunday morning at Tito’s Diner in Fredericksburg (thankfully, a no-fly zone), we were off to the National Museum of the Marines, in Triangle, Virginia. The town’s geometric name comes from its Greek founder, Dimitris Isosceles. Yeah, we couldn’t even say that with a straight face. It’s actually from the manner in which three roads surround the center of town. At the museum, we encountered more experiential theaters, the original flag from the famous Iwo Jima photograph that provided the inspiration for Washington D.C.’s U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, and Scott reminding us that “there is no such thing as an ex-Marine, only living Marines and dead Marines.” On the drive from the museum to Nationals Park, the minivan’s air conditioning started failing and conked out completely as we entered Washington DC (talk about your capital punishment). By this, our fourth day of being cooped up together, now without the aid of AC (have we mentioned the late-July heat?), we could confidently confirm that there are no ex-BIBs, only living BIBs and those that smell like they’re dead.
USA Today ranks Nationals Park number 15 among the 30 MLB stadiums – right smack dab in the middle. On the plus side, misters were plentiful throughout the park (have we mentioned the late-July heat?) and there is a nifty bar atop the center field stands. On the other hand, the architects made it virtually impossible to walk a lap around the stadium without a GPS and a sherpa. Doing so requires a series of level changes and switchbacks that you’d expect to find in a national park, not Nationals Park. The box score shows a 5-0 loss to the Cardinals, attended by 28,738 patrons, including, to our left, a family in the middle of our row that made 57 trips to the concession stand and, to our right, a yak in the aisle. Make that a “yack” in the aisle, as in “from a child not able to make it to the restroom”. Nothing like coming to the game and seeing a young hurler tossing a few sliders.
Scott’s home is in Richmond, Virginia, southwest of Washington, DC. Baltimore Washington International airport is northeast of Washington, DC. Nevertheless, Scott was good enough to drive the rest of us to BWI, before turning right around and trying to nurse his van and its failing electrical system the more than two-and-a-half hours back to Richmond. A few other electrical items failed along the way, but thankfully, given that a portion of the drive was in the dark, none of them were the headlights. As BIB 2022 drew to a close, Scott had to be happy to still see his van go on such a starry night. Hashtag BIBpuns.
