Last Road Game – Day 19

---

Atlanta Braves Road Game - Monday – March 19^th



Hello for Palm Beach Garden (at the hotel). This is the last day that we go to a baseball game, so it means our vacation is rapidly winding down. There are still another couple of days, but the reality of the situation is beginning to hit us. Of course, the up side is that we are anxious to get home and see the family back there.



We had a relatively early departure this morning, so once again we could not sleep very late. We got up and had another full breakfast. However today, Janet got the cook to prepare French Toast. She ordered one slice of French Toast and one egg-over-medium, and she got two of each. David had his pancakes and omelet. With juice, milk, tea, pastries, and fresh fruit, it made another good breakfast.



We haven’t really described the hotel yet, so will include a couple of pictures too. We are in a suite on the 2^nd floor, right across from the elevators. There is a nice front room with a couch, desk, TV and kitchen area, with a king sized bed and bath in the other room. The hotel has a very large lobby, including a small pond and waterfall, a dining area where the breakfasts and bar are located, and of course a pool/hot tub/sauna outside our window. The pond has 2 swans (Bach and Beethoven) that have lived in the hotel since we first came here in 2001.



We boarded the bus and left at 9:00 this morning. Today we knew we were going to Orlando, but were surprised when we actually pulled through the gates of Disneyworld. This was a drive of about 2 ½ hours, but it was almost all turnpike. This was smooth riding and they played another movie (Field of Dreams) for us to watch. Now, we did not actually go to Disneyworld, or Epcot, or any of the other playgrounds, but we did go to the ESPN Wide World of Sports complex. This is a really large complex and certainly impressed us with the whole place. We did get to see Mickey Mouse once as he came out with the people to through the “first pitch”.



This stadium is where the Atlanta Braves do their spring training workouts and games. It is a double-decker stadium with lots of Braves gift shops, concession stands, and many drink stations. Our seats were in the 9^th row, behind home plate and slightly along the 3^rd base side. There were over 8800 people there but there were a lot of Cardinal fans. This was the first time that we were not under a covering or in the shade, and it was kind of warm (82 degrees). We kept applying sun block lotion, so fortunately we seem to have avoided getting any sunburn.



The game was very exciting (sitting that close to the field you can see even more than in the other stadiums) and we were happy to see that many of the first-sting players had made the trip (only a few exceptions). This was the 6^th game we have seen and the second one where Lance Lynn pitched in place of Carpenter. We have also seen Garcia, Westbrook, Lohse, and Wainwright – all of them did well for the first several innings and kept us in each game. Today we happily hung on and won 4-3, although it was very suspenseful in the 9^th inning before they got the last out. But that made the final bus ride back to the hotel more enjoyable. Our overall Spring record was 4-2.



For dinner, David went to a local pizza parlor and got a pizza to go. We got a couple of glasses of wine at the manager’s reception and then had our own little pizza dinner in our room. This gave us a quick chance for showers to wash off all the lotion (sun block) which had made us kind of sticky. We had drunk a lot of water to keep from getting dehydrated in the sun, but we were hungry and not interested in going to a fancy restaurant. But it was fine.



Tomorrow we are going to improvise some activities (no game scheduled), but it will be more self paced and should be a bit more restful. But we don’t want to spoil tomorrow’s plot, so we will stop here.

---

Photos

Hotel Lobby
Embassy Suites - Palm Beach Gardens

Swans
in the lobby pond

Janet
at Wide World of Sports Entrance

View of Stadium
seen from right field

Janet
in the seats (row J)