Niagara Road Trip, Day Two: Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Despite a forecast for rain, today has turned out to be a beautiful day! The hotel advertised a daily free continental breakfast so we started our day at a time we considered relatively early (we were headed out the door by 9:30 a.m....here's us looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed)...


but were apparently too late for said breakfast which ended promptly at...9:30 a.m. So we wound up having a very healthy breakfast from the McDonald's adjacent to the hotel. Mmmm...greasy...

We then headed out on our voyage to the glorious Baseball Hall of Fame. Here is where we parked (picture taken of Shane's Blackberry so that we'd remember the location)...


And here is the Baseball Hall of Fame (a lovely couple from out West somewhere took this picture for us...Angels fans, just in case anyone was curious)...


The Hall of Fame contained all sorts of wonderful baseball relics...here are just a few of the SEVERAL pictures that Shane took while we were there. This first one is of Babe Ruth's locker...


The is the most expensive and rare baseball card out there (it's worth about $3 million)...


This is a locker full of more recent Yankees stuff (Alex Rodriguez's batting helmet, CC Sabathia's shoes...which are gigantic, the batting gloves Derek Jeter was wearing when he broke the record for career hits as a Yankee, etc.)...


Here is a picture of Shane in Hank Aaron's locker...


And the piece de resistance...only appearing this very weekend at the Hall of Fame...the Yankees' 2009 World Series Trophy...


Ooooo...shiny. Here's a picture of Shane with the trophy...


Here's a picture of me with the trophy (the 3rd attempt...I blinked in the first two)...


Then, surprise of surprises, we ran into Don Mattingly and Derek Jeter! Right in the actual hall of fame where all of the plaques are hung!


Boy, did they look different in person. Shane also took several pictures of the plaques for different players...so I chose one to include in my blog. For your viewing pleasure, the Babe's Hall of Fame plaque.


After that we took a short spin around the gift shop...looked at all the overpriced merchandise ($100 sweatshirts and whatnot)...and then that was that. Doing all of this actually took a lot less time than we thought it would, so we went and grabbed a couple of hot dogs and pondered what we'd do next...

Here's me sipping my lunchtime root beer...


Here's Shane being Shane...


We couldn't really come up with anything else good to do (there's not really a whole lot going on in Cooperstown, NY) so we decided to take a leisurely walk down to Otsego Lake and sit on a bench for a while. Here's a picture of us at the lake...


It was really very nice and relaxing. We then decided we wanted to try to go feed some deer at a place where they said you could do so...but for the life of us, we couldn't find it. So after driving around for a little while, we decided to return to the hotel to relax a bit and then we'll head out to dinner before, you guessed it, watching the 2.5 hour series finale of LOST. Not an action-packed day by any means but it's been relaxing and the weather has been nice so I'm happy.

Tomorrow we embark on the second half of our trip to Niagara Falls! We're actually staying on the Canadian side of the Falls so a trip across the border is in order. I'm wondering if my GPS is actually going to work in Canada...hmmm...well, it'll be an adventure!