On our way from Boston to Toronto, we built in a stop at Cooperstown to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. To get to Cooperstown, we took a less direct path that took us across southern Vermont with a lunch stop in Bennington, VT. Neither Melinda and I had ever been to Vermont, and we enjoyed the trip across the Green Mountains and can now add Vermont to our listed states visited.
Cooperstown is a small town in upstate New York and it wasn't very busy when we were there, which was great for us. We spent all day Monday, May 15 visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame. There were all kinds of interesting exhibits on different facets of baseball from baseball cards to stadiums to the African-American history with baseball. The afternoon was devoted to looking at the plaques of all the players, managers and executives who have been enshrined in the Hall of Fame. Everyone from Babe Ruth to Lou Gehrig to Ted Williams to Eddie Murray to Jackie Robinson. It is Nirvana for a baseball nerd.
I had to include one plaque from a Cleveland player to give you an example and brag on Guardians/Indians a little (there aren't too many Cleveland players in the Hall of Fame). Jim Thome was a star on the great Cleveland teams of the 1990's that went to two World Series (BTW, I still haven't gotten over losing to the Marlins in seven games in 1997). It was great to see his plaque there.
After we left Cooperstown, we drove to Toronto. We decided to go around the eastern end of Lake Ontario and cross the border at the Thousand Island crossing. This was our first time out of the U.S. since 2019. When we were about 45 minutes down the highway in Canada we noticed that our phones no longer had a signal. We pulled off into a rest stop which, thankfully, had Wifi. Once we checked on Wifi, we found out that we were supposed to notify the carrier 24 hours in advance before leaving the country (oops). Long story short, we were able to chat with the carrier over Wifi and get them to turn on international service. The upshot was that delayed our arrival in Toronto by a couple of hours, and we hit downtown right around 5:00. The last mile took us at least 30 minutes.
However, our painful arrival was soon overcome by our wonderful hotel. We stayed in a Delta hotel using Marriott points (Melinda scored a great deal). This hotel is right next to the ballpark and is much nicer than the Fairfield Inn's we've been staying in. We ended up with a corner room on the 44th floor with great views of the skyscrapers of downtown Toronto (see the night view from our room below). We also had lounge access - the picture on the right is from Melinda sitting in the lounge looking out onto Lake Ontario.
Our tickets for the game were on Wednesday, May 17. We spent that day walking around downtown including stops at Union Station and the lobby of the Fairmont Royal York (visible in the picture to the left). This is a grand old hotel built in 1929. We also visited St. James church and had lunch at the St. Lawrence market. The only downside was that it was cold (even by Toronto standards) and temperatures only reached the low 50's. We ended the day with a boat tour of the Toronto harbor. This boat gave us great views of the Toronto skyline and we learned about the history of the city. (Did you know that Toronto is the 4th largest city in North America by population).
Our hotel was a 10 minute walk from the Rogers Centre (aka the Skydome). This stadium has a retractable roof, and we were thankful that it was closed since it was so cold outside. The stadium is also known for the hotel attached to the stadium with some of the rooms having a view from the outfield. The game was between the hometown Blue Jays and the Yankees. It warmed my heart to see how much the Blue Jays fans (and players) disliked the Yankees. This was game three of a four game series between these two teams, and there had been bad blood between the teams in the first two games (won by the Yankees). Even Aaron Judge, who is liked by everyone, was booed lustily by the 27,000 fans in attendance.
The game was a pitcher's duel and was 0-0 after nine innings. In the bottom of the 10th, Danny Jansen from the Blue Jays hit a three run walk-off homer. Needless to say, the crowd went crazy. To quote the legendary Earl Weaver, the key to success is "Pitching, defense and the three-run homer."
Since we'd never spent any time in Toronto before, we scheduled an extra day for checking out the city. On Thursday, May 18, we went up the CN tower, next door to our hotel. The observation level is 1,135 ft up. We decided to use the elevator :-). BTW, the elevator has glass floors so you can look down as you go up. We had great views in all directions (the picture with Melinda is looking south) and you can even look all the way across Lake Ontario to Niagara Falls on a clear day.
After the tower, we took the subway up to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). This is an excellent museum for natural history (lots of dinosaur bones) with a great collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian artifacts. From there we walked down Bloor Street which turned out to be the Rodeo Drive of Toronto with lots of high end stores. We were headed to the Toronto Public Reference Library. This was a very modern structure but had a very cool interior layout. We headed to the reading room - this was not quite as nice as the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library - in part because Melinda ended up sitting next to a homeless guy. To be fair, we saw far fewer homeless folks on the streets in Toronto than in the other big cities we've visited.
Next stop - Niagara Falls.
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