matt's 24th birthday present was a weekend retreat to cooperstown, new york. a cute little town west of albany, named for james fenimore cooper, smack dab in the middle of, well, nowhere. we drove up friday night to a small town about 30 miles away from cooperstown. turns out that this "small town" was a hoppin' metropolis compared to the rest of the tiny towns and farmlands surrounding it: it had a pizza hut, a high school, a strip mall, and there were rumors of a wal-mart somewhere further down the road, not to mention the econo lodge where we stayed. (quaint, but clean and homey!) rural new york state is amazingly beautiful in the fall. this was the view from our motel:
now, i know that i was an english major, but the reason we went up to cooperstown was not to indulge any literary history craving. rather, since matt is the biggest baseball fan i know, i took him up to cooperstown to visit the national baseball hall of fame. he'd never been there (hard to believe!), but i had (harder to believe?). so we headed into cooperstown yesterday morning, driving through tiny rural towns and autumn trees that were already starting to show their colors. we arrived in cooperstown and found a downtown strip littered with baseball memoribilia shops and a pumpkin festival, where the prize-winning pumpkin weighed in at 1400+ pounds (eeks!). we ate a quick lunch in a local bagel shop and then entered the baseball mecca.
summary of our time there: tracking down the hall of fame plaques of our favorite players, winding through the baseball timeline, seeing old uniforms, old balls, old bats, looking at a "baseball in art" exhibit, looking at long-standing records, tracing the histories of our favorite teams (me: cubs; matt: mets), learning quirky trivia (did you know that at one point, every member of a team wore a color-coded uniform that corresponded to his field position?)...
you don't have to be an uber-fan to enjoy that place. it's a ton of fun. take a look:
after a leisurely afternoon bumming around the museum, we wandered around town and ate some ice cream, bought matt a new mets cap, meandered in and out of shops looking at jerseys (sooo expensive) and shirts and baseball cards. and then we ate a wonderful early birthday dinner at nicoletta's italian cafe.
fall needs pretty trees. fall needs baseball. fall needs a beautiful getaway birthday weekend!
happy birthday to my amazing husband!
i love you!
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