Once again we met up in Cleveland. Dave got off the plane to be greeted by DC and Marty (his sister-in-law) with news of the O.J. Simpson slow motion car chase on the L.A. Freeway, which was going on at that moment. The next day we went to the new home of the Cleveland Indians.

Jacobs Field is part of the recent (and welcome) trend of putting ballparks downtown instead of out in the suburbs. It's not as nice as Camden Yards but nicer than the new Comiskey Park. The Indians were red hot at that time and continued their long home winning streak by beating up on Roger Clemons. Albert Belle hit a home run, as he always did whenever Dave was in attendance - until he joined the Orioles of course. This game marked the debut of the Two Guys & a Map '94 Tour t-shirts.

The next day we drove on up to Detroit. (For more detail on Tiger Stadium, see 1991 - The Lost In Cleveland Tour) The game was not nearly as exciting as the one we saw there three years earlier but because the crowd was smaller, we were able to move all around the upper deck, ending up right over home plate.

Right after the Tiger game we left the country. We crossed over into Canada at Windsor and drove on up to Toronto. The next morning we headed on over to the new site of The Hockey Hall of Fame. Dave, a big hockey fan, had been to The Hockey Hall of Fame a few years earlier when it was housed in a building on the National Exhibition grounds. He was sorely disappointed in it - the exhibits were messy and poorly organized, there were mistakes in the information and the place was dirty. Since then The Hall of Fame had moved into a former bank building in downtown Toronto. What an amazing difference! The building is beautiful - there is a stained glass sky light in the roof, the exhibits are well organized and informative, there are interactive exhibits - a vast improvement over the previous incarnation. DC is not much of a hockey fan but he was impressed.

But we had come to Toronto to see baseball. First we stopped at the CN Tower, which is the tallest man made structure in North America. Then we headed into The Skydome. We like to wander the ballpark, to get a feel for the whole place when we go on these trips - that's not possible in The Skydome. You are forced to enter the building through particular entrances, depending on where your seats are. I'm sure that's to ensure a quicker, easier trip to your seat but it also gives off an aura of first-class vs. steerage. We were sitting in the lower deck and could not go up to the upper deck. I'm sure that the people in the "cheap seats" (a relative term in Toronto) couldn't make their way down to the lower deck!

Two Guys at Jacobs Field

The Stanley Cup

The CN Tower, from inside The Skydome

We had the unusual experience of seeing two teams we'd seen in two different cities over the previous two days playing each other in a third city. Boston beat the Blue Jays. The most exciting thing was that for the first time in over thirty years of going to baseball games, Dave caught a foul ball! This was shortly after we had been discussing the fact that neither of us ever had done so. It was hit by Devon White, who had played an important role in the Tigers - Blue Jays game we had seen in Detroit three years earlier. We also saw the retractable roof on The Skydome close. We had read that the Blue Jays keep it closed unless the weather is really beautiful but when we arrived at the stadium under grey skies, the roof was open. Around the seventh inning DC noticed it was moving and we watched it off and on for the next twenty minutes as we went from being sort-of-outside to inside a roofed building.

The next morning we went to a museum of modern art, then shuffled off to Buffalo. DC has a cousin there who he hadn't seen in many years. Both Jeannie and her daughter are very nice and they went with us to see the Triple A Buffalo Bison. Pilot Field is interesting. Not a major league ballpark by any means (in both good and bad ways), it was designed so that it can be easily expanded if they ever get major league baseball and will make a nice major league park if it is upgraded to that level. That is also an apt description of the quality of Triple A baseball - very good but you can tell it's not quite the majors. Buffalo won a well played game in extra innings.