Seven Cities, Six Ballgames, Three Weeks.

And so I have returned from brief visits to Seattle, Minneapolis, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans and Los Angeles . . . from which I bring the following reports and impressions.

Seattle is a wonderful city. I can’t point to anything specific, but there’s a good feeling about the place. Of course, there’s the rain . . . 

I saw two baseball games in Minneapolis (Red Sox losers in both) and when I left the hotel and asked the bellman to call a taxi to take me to the train station, he said, “There are no taxis anymore”. It seems Uber has put the taxi cabs out of business in Minneapolis.

I saw two games in Boston and the Red Sox won both. I had a seat on the Green Monster for the first game and Connor Wong, infielder/catcher for the Red Sox, hit a monster home run high over the wall where I was sitting and completely out of the ballpark.

I went from Boston to New York and took Amtrak’s Silver Star to Florida and a nice almost-three-day visit with my sister in Mount Dora. Then back to Baltimore for two games (both Red Sox wins).

A day later I boarded Amtrak’s New York-to-New-Orleans train, the Crescent,  which is notoriously late, but on this occasion was miraculously on time.

Four words are an adequate description of the food served on the eastern overnight trains: frozen, microwaved, served, awful.

In the deep south, if it doesn’t move, kudzu covers it.

It was in New Orleans that word came of the pending strike against the freight railroads. Within minutes, Amtrak cancelled my return to the West Coast on the Sunset Limited. That meant one extra day in New Orleans and another in L.A. and, thanks to a prompt refund from Amtrak, a flight from New Orleans to L.A and after a day on the West Coast, another flight non-stop to Maui.

Curious incidents: there was no telephone in my hotel room in New Orleans, so for a wake-up call, they had to send someone up from the front desk to knock on my door. The phone in my hotel room at the L.A. airport didn’t work, so for a wake-up call, they had to send someone from the front desk to knock on my door.