Day 8 (8/26), "Schmidtty, we got an exit."

Sunday morning, our last in Philly.

We awoke at Maggie's brother's house a bit on the tired side. The previous day was long, busy, and hard on the body (alcohol and extreme heat don't mix well). Sunday wouldn't be much different, as we had a lot planned on our last day in Philly. First on the list was to catch a Phillies game.

The game started at 1:00, but we were at least an hour from the park, as well as hungry and in need of coffee, so we decided to leave fairly early in the morning. As we approached Citizens Bank Park, we decided to splurge and pay for a parking spot close to the stadium. We arrived at about 10:30 AM. When we pulled in to the park, we realized we drove through the wrong entrance. When we explained this to the man collecting a $20 charge, he understood our mistake and was sympathetic to our desire to go to the cheaper parking lot. He was also intent on making a big scene out of our mistake, and he proceeded to yell at his partners to make way for us to do a U-turn and exit through the entrance. Upon hearing of our mistake, he shouted to his partner across the lot, "Schmidtty, we got an exit!" Almost immediately, a whole crew of parking attendants, while yelling at each other, rearranged the orange cones directing traffic, stopped oncoming cars, and motioned us through the lot's entrance. How accommodating!

Anyway, we ultimately found a cheaper lot not too much further from the park than the one we just exited. When we found the right spot, we parked, hopped out of the car, and found the warm beers and whiskey that had been sitting in the back of Maggie's vehicle for the last few days. As it turned out, that was the only thing we put in our stomachs all morning, as we skipped breakfast and never got the coffee that we all craved. Without anything in our bellies, it didn't take long before we were buzzed.

While sitting in the parking lot drinking, we watched other tailgaters play quaits, the same game that folks were playing at the wedding. We also entertained ourselves by watching Nate play with one of those wooden raquets with the little bouncy ball attached to it. After an hour or so, we decided to head inside the park. When we entered, we went straight to the concession stand, where we each got a beer. While sipping the cold beer (a welcome change to the warm ones we had been drinking earlier), we walked around the park in search of our seats. We finally found them in the upper deck between third base and the left field foul pole. Our neighbors, in the seats behind us, were a family headed by on of the most vocal fans I've seen. The dude had something to say for every player who came to bat, whether it was cheering for one of the Phillies, or harassing one of the Padres (their opponent). The dude even yelled and cheered when the beer guys came to our section of seats. Seriously, the guy did not stop yelling...it was awesome. He even had his little daughter yelling.

While watching the game, I decided to take a picture of the park on my phone and send it to a buddy back in Portland (Bobby, who is a Phillies fan and from Pennsylvania). When he got the picture text, he quickly called back to inform me that his family was at the game. He told us what section they were in and said we should go say hello. In between innings, the crew migrated to where Bobby's family was sitting. We found seats right next to them and introduced ourselves. Maggie and I had already met Bobby's sister when she visited Portland some months earlier, and since Bobby's dad looked just like Bobby with grey hair, it seemed like we already knew him as well. While sitting next to Bobby's dad, he began telling me stories of his growing up in Philly. He also spoke about the neighborhood where Bobby's mom grew up, in South Philly, just across from the parking lot of the stadium. After chatting with them for a while, doing our best not to slur our words and hide our drunken states, we got bumped from the seats by late-arriving fans.

The four of us finished out the game and then headed back to Maggie's house, where we were going to eat dinner with her family before making our way up to New England. On the way back to the house, we picked up some cheesesteaks, as it was my last chance to indulge in the tasty treat in its birthplace. After eating dinner, we packed up the car and headed north. We drove through New York (passing by White Plains), Connecticut (New Haven and Hartford) and Rhode Island. In Rhode Island, Nate and I, while the girls were asleep, decided to take a little detour and drive through downtown Providence. From Providence, we were only half an hour from Attleboro, where we stayed with Jen, Maggie's friend from college.

We made it to Jen's house after 2:00 in the morning. Although late, we stayed up a bit to chat and talk about what our plans were for the next day. It wasn't long, though, before got tired and had to hit the sack. I went to bed first, claiming the room on the second floor, where I fell asleep to the sound of the loudest fan ever (I couldn't turn it off, because the humidity would have been equally as annoying).

Day 7 (8/25), Blistering Heat and a Wedding

Wedding day.

We awoke Saturday, alone in Maggie's house, she and all her family down on the Jersey Shore setting up for the wedding. We were left with directions on how to get to the wedding site, about an hour and a half from Philly in rural New Jersey. We were also informed of the casual nature of the wedding, as well as the heat, and told that shorts would be an acceptable style of dress, as long as they were matched with a collared shirt. As Nate and I were already well aware of our sensitivity to the heat, we had no problem donning shorts at the ceremony.

With traffic and pit stops, our drive took closer to two hours, getting us to the wedding about a minute before the ceremony began. Although we were given permission to wear shorts, it was very awkward to show up to the wedding late and in shorts, especially since we knew a total of four people there. Because we were the last to arrive, we were left with the only seats left. As it was an outdoor wedding, and the temperature was expected to hit 98 degrees, most of the seats were covered by a large tent. However, the seats we were left with did not get the shade many were able to enjoy.

The lack of shade immediately became problematic. It wasn't more than two minutes that I had an enormous sweat stain on my chest, back, and one in each arm pit. And it was at the four minute mark when I developed a stain on the crotch of my shorts (from sweat dripping off my chin) and one on my butt (from the accumulated sweat dripping down my back). While I can give my own lengthy and obscene description of the miserable combination of heat and humidity, I'll rather offer the readers an excerpt from Nate's journal, detailing the toture we went through:

"It was so fucking hot and humid. I was sitting there sweating, ridiculously. Sweat was pooling up in my ass crack, beading all over. A constant drip formed from my nose and chin. I can honestly say that I have never been so uncomfortable in my life. It was terrible. I sweat through my shirt, shorts, and my hair was part afro, part sweaty strips of hair glued to my sweaty, gleaming forehead. I sat with my head down, holding my head, and wiping the salty sweat that was obstructing my vision away from my eyes. While looking around and wondering why the fuck weren’t these people perspiring profusely, I mean I know they're locals, but that shit is natural, there is no getting used to that kind of weather, why are these people not sweating like me. I was beginning to get angry. Then came the mosquitoes, out in full force. So, here I am in New Jersey at some fucking wedding, I don’t know any of these people, why am I here enduring this shit. No amount of free food and alcohol will make up for this…Fuck it…I want to leave, but where do I go. Nowhere is the answer. I can’t leave, I’m trapped at this place and must tolerate the heat and bugs. The wedding lasted approximately 20 minutes. Seemed like it would never end. I don’t know what happened in the ceremony, no idea cause I wasn’t paying attention at all, just sweating while worrying about heat stroke and communicable diseases that these mosquitoes might be passing me. I hate those lil’ vampire fuckers. At one point in the ceremony I almost got up to walk away, maybe douse myself with water, maybe hydrate myself a little bit…but I realized that it would be too awkward and people were already staring at me like I was some kind of alien or freak of nature. Although it’s easy easy to assume that I wasn’t looking my best. So I’m angry, like really pissed off about my current situation. I was on the verge of losing my sanity and just start running around screaming obscenities. Luckily, I was able to keep my composure. I looked at Jeff, noticed that he is in a similar situation, and could tell the was on the same page as I, so that helped a bit. I don’t think I could have lasted 21 minutes, I would have lost it. The wedding ended, reception began, while the sweating and awkward stares persisted. I think I made an impression, not necessarily a good one, more like what the fuck is wrong with this guy and who is he."

To say the least, Nate and I had a little difficulty handling the heat and 800% humidity. It was so bad that I was forced to go to the car immediately after the groom (Maggie's brother) kissed the bride, where I sat in front of the air conditioner and drank a gallon of water. After rehydrating and cooling off, I went back to the wedding, at which point the reception had started. The site was an old farm not too far from the Jersey shore. The centerpiece of the rural site, called Bull on the Barn, was a crab shack that served local catches. Next to the crab shack was an outdoor bar. Both the crab shack and bar were surrounded by open land, fully vulnerable to the blistering sun and heat.

Upon my return from the car, I found myself a huge fan in the bar, which I took the liberty of monopolizing to the fullest extent. While I felt sort of bad hogging the breeze from the fan, it became obvious to everyone else that I was most in need of it, as my pale (now probably bright red) face and numerous sweat stains loudly stated that I was close to passing out.

When I was done sweating (due to dangerously low levels of water in my system), I ventured to the crab shack, where Nate, Stacey and I sat with Maggie's grandma. Nate and I attacked the crab with a vengeance, returning to the food line multiple times for seconds and thirds. Somehow, with my novice crab-cracking skills (I've never really had crab before), I managed to puncture the tip of my index finger with the crustacean's leg. However, after enduring the most miserable 20 minutes of my life in the sun, the pain from the cut was relatively small, and I just continued eating crab....and more crab.

After stuffing my gut with crab, I again needed to find a breeze somewhere. I departed the crab shack and headed back to the bar, in hopes nobody took over "my" fan. When walking to the bar, I found the most amazing discovery: the narrow walkway between the crab shack and the bar produced a wind tunnel that was equal in strength to the fan. So, to not appear selfish and anti-social, I hung out in the walkway and attempted to talk to the people who had to squeeze by me. After a while of being an awkward obstacle in the walkway, I decided to rotate between the fan and wind tunnel. This way, it sort of looked like I was mingling and not such a wall flower.

After a while, I grew restless. There were a few people playing horse shoes, so I checked them out for a bit. As it turns out, it wasn't horse shoes, rather it was a game called "quaits," I think. Similar concept, but instead of trying to get a horseshoe around a spike, you have to toss a weight onto a board with a target on it. The closer you get to the target in the middle, the more points you get. Apparently it's popular out there, because I saw tailgaters playing the same game in the parking lot at the Phillie's game (the next day). Anyway, the game didn't catch my interest enough, so I wondered around to the field in the back. There, I found a kid hitting a wiffle ball by himself. So, being the baseball lover that I am, I told him that I could beat him, and challenged him to a game. As it turns out, the kid (probably only 13) was pretty good. He hit a couple homeruns off of me and ran his score to 10 before I got up. After such a long half inning, my at bat finally arrived. I was intent on rocking this kid, outdoing his 10 runs by at least 2...and then quitting while I was ahead. Well, the kid struck me out three times before I was able to get my 4th run. Frustrated and defeated, I told the kid I needed to get back to my fan.

When the wedding ended, most headed to a beach house that the bride and groom rented on the shore in Fortescue, NJ. It was a beautiful location, reminiscent of some presidential vacation spot on Martha's Vineyard. Before the sun went down, we all decided to walk down to the beach and go for a swim. It was a good thing that I had been drinking, because Nate's warnings of hypodermic needles often being found on the Jersey Shore did not scare me as much as it should have. So, Maggie, her twin sisters and I jumped in and swam toward a reported sand bar some 100 yards from the beach. Maggie insisted that the waves breaking off the coast meant there was shallow water, thus we could swim out there and stand up. It took like 15 minutes to swim out there. Maggie found it first and, as I didn't believe there was a sand bar, scared the shit out of me when she started standing on water. Eventually I found the narrow spit of shallow ground and stood on water as well. It was pretty cool, I must say.

Anyway, we eventually swam back to shore and decided to call it a night. We gathered all our stuff, said our goodbyes, and headed back to Maggie's brothers house, as he and his groom had left town for their honeymoon, and we weren't up for the drive back to Philly. On the way to his house, we stopped at a hoagie shop/market called WaWa's. Here, we were able to custom order (by computer) our own Italian hoagies. Apparently my order was so far from what an Italian hoagie is, the lady, when receiving my order, rolled her eyes at me. Then, when completing my sandwich, handed it to me and said, "Here's your creation, whatever it is." Great, thanks lady.

Nate and I grabbed a bottle of whiskey to compliment our hoagies. When we got the house, we found multiple puddles of pee from the dog (Tuco...taken from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) that had been sitting in the house all day. We maneuvered around the pee puddles, found a spot to sit, and scarfed down our sandwiches. Nate and I sat outside for a while, taking a few shots from the bottle of whiskey, before growing tired and returning to the house where we all crashed for the night. Despite the endured torture of heat and humidity, the day was actually quite nice. The wedding was mellow, down to earth, had good food and music, and the people were all very nice. For good and bad, the wedding in Jersey will never be forgotten.