Pictures from Detroit part 1

Took a fair number of pictures on my trip to Detroit, mostly at Comerica Park and the Detroit Zoo. Here's what I snapped:



From the car with my IPhone, the Uniroyal Tire. It's off of 94 and always means to me that you're in Detroit. Our hotel was in Troy, just off of HWY 75 and Big Beaver Road, exit 69....I'm not even joking. You can't make shit like that up.











The reason we went to Detroit, in addition to seeing the Cubs play, was to have dinner with Hall of Famer Ernie Harwell. We had such a nice dinner with him and his wife, Lulu. One of the topics we discussed was how he (and all radio broadcasters back before TV) would recreate the game action over the radio, even though he wasn't at the game. For road games, the broadcasters wouldn't travel with the team and would get minimal information sent to them via teletype and then the broadcasters would have to make up what happened: where the ball was fouled, the pitch being high or low, etc. They were essentially actors. Ernie even did some play-by-play as an example for us. Very fun.




Here we are after the dinner. Ernie autographed two books for me and personalized a message on one page copies of his hall of fame induction speech I had made. He made one for me and one for my dad. Then I called my dad and handed the phone to Ernie and they chatted for a few minutes. Very fun!!









Here's the statue of Ernie Harwell just inside the main gate at Comerica. As Ernie said, "They made me 300 pounds and hollow."
















Here's the main entrance at Comerica. Pretty cool.








Inside the stadium is a big courtyard area that has this ferris wheel and some big topiary baseball players.






















Also inside are several daiquiri bars which have four flavors of daiquiris. Here, Laura mixed Dreamsicle orange with strawberry I believe and I had the same. The next day she had all orange and I went all strawberry. So good!!

































Views from the seats for game one. Front row, upper deck, just to the right of home plate. A nice scoreboard view.





Lovely Laura in our front row seats.














Towards the end of the game, Detroit held their fireworks display down by the river. Ugh. It was nice to see, especially from our seats, but it was a traffic nightmare. We had to drink at Hockeytown, across the street from the stadium, for about 90 minutes or so. Not the worst thing!





















So that was Wednesday night, right after we go to Detroit. Thursday was a day game and our seats are pictured below. We had dinner with Ernie on Thursday evening.


Yep, one row off the field. At the end of an inning, the Tigers right fielder flipped a ball towards Laura which I tried to catch for her. It hit off my hand as the throng of people behind me tried to grab it and fell harmless to a couple in the front row. Dammit!!! So close. Oh well.

It was so hot at the game that they ran out of water! At $3.75 a pop, they lost some money. There was a line for every drinking fountain at the stadium. We left in the ninth inning to make sure we could get home in time to shower and get to dinner.











I saw this sign outside of the stadium on Wednesday and thought it was funny. No Standing. Ha!