July 29-30th, 2014
I’m not lying when I say we often don’t know where we’ll be sleeping on any given night during our road trips. Our eventful voyage to San Francisco perfectly captures the sometimes hectic nature of our road trips.
Like our issue in Los Angeles, with the Dodgers and Angels never home at the same time, the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics also avoid playing home games on the same dates. This meant we again had to find the perfect time to catch one team right before they were leaving for the road, and boy were we planning on catching the Giants right before they left. They had a home game at 12:45 pm the day after the Dodgers game we attended. San Francisco is six hours away from Los Angeles, and if we didn’t make this game, we wouldn’t see the Giants. Instead of waiting until the morning, we decided to begin driving towards the Bay Area right after the Dodgers game to gain a couple of hours.
It took a while to make it on the highway from Dodger Stadium, and once we were on, loads of construction backed up traffic in the middle of the night. Everyone in the car had fallen asleep except my dad, who was driving, and myself. We listened to James Taylor while waiting in bumper to bumper traffic. As we continued on, we weren’t quite sure what to do. We didn’t know how long the traffic would last, and my parents didn’t want to drive all night. It was around 2:00 a.m when we stopped at a motel in a tiny town called Lebec. The plan was to wake up at 6:00 a.m, so we only slept four hours.
Waking up in the morning was a mad dash to get out. We got ready as quickly as possible, got breakfast to go at Carl’s Jr and were off for San Francisco just past 7:00 a.m. After a few hours, we drove in through Oakland and crossed the Bay Bridge to get to San Francisco. In the car, I had called the Giants to find out information about parking and directions, but when we got closer to the stadium, we decided to follow Google Maps instead of the directions I got. This led us to a public parking lot, not a Giants lot, and we hurried out to the game. A beautiful walk along the water guided us to the gates, and we had arrived at AT&T Park, home of the San Francisco Giants.
To add to the craziness of how we got here, we couldn’t find five tickets altogether, so on the way in we had to purchase three tickets together and then two others seperately. When we got into the ballpark, we had to split up. Adrian and I stayed on the lower deck while the rest of my family had tickets upstairs. We had great seats on the third base line that were super close to the field. The Giants took an early 3-0 lead, but the Pirates tied it up quickly. Then the Giants retook the lead, but Jordy Mercer hit a two-run home run to give Pittsburgh a 5-4 lead. At this time Adrian and I walked up a long ramp to go upstairs and meet my mom for our behind home plate picture, and the view of the bay from up here is truly spectacular. We then arranged to meet Alan and my dad in left field to walk around the ballpark.
Finally with all of us together, I first went to get my passport stamp, which the lady at guest services messed up and made me upset. I had to get an extra stamp on a separate sheet of paper so I could tape it over later. Next we saw the huge glove and coca-cola bottle in left field, which was super cool. We kept walking around the outfield and saw the glistening waters of McCovey Cove right behind AT&T Park. We saw people in kayaks on the water hoping to catch home runs that leave the stadium and land in the water. That takes quite the dedication, but it’s amazing that people can even do that at a baseball stadium!
As we walked, the Giants rallied and took a 6-5 lead. We bought some of AT&T Park’s famous garlic fries and went back to our seats on the lower level. Towards the end of the game, “Lights” by Journey, the iconic band that is from San Francisco, played in the stadium and the entire crowd sand along. I’ll never forget this moment, as it was the first time I had heard this song and it was so fitting for the moment and the city. “When the lights go down in the city, and the sun shines on the bay.” We were right here on the bay!
The Giants pulled out a 7-5 victory and the home teams on our trip remained undefeated. We made a quick stop at the team store for my mini-bat and then took some pictures at the main entrance with the Willie Mays statue. We had officially exited AT&T Park, one of the most beautiful ballparks we had seen thus far.
Although the game had ended, our day was far from over. Rather than walking around downtown now, we decided to walk back to the car first. When we got back to the parking lot, we were in for a big surprise, but that’s a story for another day…