Time was, we couldn't believe our good fortune in never being rained out. Those days are
long gone. Our visit to Auburn was not, in fact, a rainout—though the game was cut short by some memorable weather. Rain threatened throughout the game, and the colorful blobs on the little map pictures on our phones were bobbing and weaving all night. And yet, inning after inning, no rain. "I think we're going to avoid it," I said, like an idiot.
We'd been moving around a bit throughout the game, and in the bottom of the eighth we'd just returned to the third-base side when it started to spatter. "Do you want to move under the roof?" asked Watson, presciently. You can guess what happened mere moments later.
We sat contentedly listening to the drumming above us, watching nearly everyone else, including the players, flee like sensible people. Cataclysmic thunder and lightning ensued. It was actually kind of terrifying. The Doubledays, it should be said, were in no way sad about this. What had been a fairly tight (2–0) game with State College after six innings had become an 8–0 blowout. We watched the grounds crew skid around like seal puppies on the tarp. We bantered with strangers. During a lull in the deluge, Rob went down to the edge of the field and asked an umpire if the game was going to be called. "Are you the official scorekeeper?" asked the ump. I think Rob totally could have passed himself off, but it would have been wrong. "Watch and see what happens," said the ump. We duly watched players return to the dugout to collect their stuff. And we took the hint, repairing to Swaby's bar for (a) its remarkable collection of
miscellany on every available wall surface; and (b) probably the worst onion rings I have or will ever "eat." Somehow, they tasted like cement powder—which, coincidentally, is one of the
products that made Buffalo Buffalo, as we learned on
our river tour.
The next day, after a perhaps too leisurely breakfast at the scenic
Hunter Dinerant, where the pie is good but not quite as good as they say it is, we did one last errand in Auburn...
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| Watson and Rob prove that Geneseeing is believing. |
...and left town, first for
Suffragette City, then for the
Corning Museum of Glass, which oh my.
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| Half of the place is an art museum... |
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| ...and the other is "oh, what fun." |
Seriously, it was much cooler than I had expected—and I had expected. We saw a glass-blowing demonstration, a whole array of startling glass art, and a salute to Pyrex and the like. The only disappointment was a heralded glass-eye exhibit, which turned out to be just one small display case. I'd regret the time spent on that, but in this instance hindsight is 20/∞.
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| To prove you are not a bot, click on all the boxes that contain a baseball player. |
We wound up that evening at the religious revival tent in Binghamton, watching the crowd go wild for
Elmer Gantry Tim Tebow. The
fervor isn't for his baseball skills, that's for sure. (This was before he suffered a season-ending injury, just possibly involving a crown of thorns.) We closed the night thinking other celestial thoughts at
Galaxy Brewing.
The last day of the Greater Empire State tour involved no baseball, just an overindulgence of
truly excellent doughnuts; an enormous
stone arch bridge; a
coal museum that isn't entirely sure whether the workers were the solution or the problem; an extravagantly good New Jersey
barbecue joint that purports to be Portuguese but gave every sign of being Filipino; and a failed attempt to visit the
Northlandz, which was unexpectedly closed, seemingly for being a menace to itself and others (i.e., fire code violations). It was an anticlimactic ending, but we were so full of pork and plantains, we didn't really care that much.
And with that, roll credits on the Canadian Fourth tour.
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