Stuck in Ellsworth, Maine. Actually, my wife and I chose to stay in Ellsworth, a small town near the Atlantic Coast, during our vacation so that we could visit the picturesque Bar Harbor that someone in San Diego suggested we see.
The agony for me was being caught in rural Ellsworth, though at the Ramada, without reception of the major league baseball playoff games on FS1 or TBS. Here Dianna, who couldn't care less about sports, and her sports-enthusiast husband were going to spend three nights out of the U.S. in Quebec--yet it was in our own country that I couldn't view the games, while among the Quebecois I could through international coverage.
How ironic.
We did enjoy the scenic rocks and tourist town of Bar Harbor. It was a dark day, and cold. So the rocks and the fishing boats moored out in harbor looked somewhat stark. (Loads of tourists from the East came piling off cruise ships and tour buses, so we ran for cover after a few cold hours.) Acadia National Park, nearby, with overlooks of the water and land formations below, showed all the colors of the fall that they advertise.
But then, to not even be able to take a glance on cable TV at any of the games at night was a little frustrating.
When we crossed over to the Canadian side, a beautiful drive in northern Maine through oranges and reds, along with a sole sighting of a moose right on the road, at first I was thinking we wouldn't have reception at our hotel in Quebec City either.
But, my bad: It turned out I just needed to look through the various Canadian sports channels to find the playoff coverage.
A whole mental shift is adjusting to watching games that start so late in the Eastern Time Zone. I've lived my whole life (except for one year in Mexico City) residing in the Pacific Time Zone. We're used to getting World Series and other big games at 5 p.m. But in the populous East, opening pitch comes three hours later in the day. It had its good on this trip, with our sightseeing all done by the evening. But its bad--staying up late (for this early-to-bed urchin) if you see the game through to the end.
I had a similar adjustment several years ago while visiting my wife's relatives in St. Louis. There the time adjustment is two hours. But with the Cardinals playing some long postseason games, I was watching from 7 p.m. until late evening. The whole rest of the house had long gone to bed by the time the games were over.
"Stuck in Lodi again", by Creedence Clearwater Revival, might have been "Stuck in Ellsworth" on this trip.
One other baseball note: I had wanted to visit Fenway Park in Boston, which I had never seen. But, lo and behold, I wasn't able to. We only had a few days in the Boston area. Then at the end of our trip, circling around from Vermont and re-entering Massachusetts from the west, it just wasn't going to be workable with our luggage and valuables in the rental car before checking in for our flight to find a subway stop (the "T"), ride into Boston, take a tour of the park (the season had ended only the week or two before), then get back to our rental car to return it in time at the airport.
Oh, well. I have never seen Wrigley Field in Chicago or Fenway in Boston, the two historical parks of the major leagues. The one chance I had in Chicago two decades ago--wouldn't you know it?--the White Sox were in town, and not the Cubs. The new Comiskey Park is pretty vanilla. Nothing like Wrigley.
Copyright 2015 Ed Piper
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