"Holiday Road" - The Official Vacation Thread

[Count Walewski]

Last night we went to Wilmington, DE to watch the Blue Rocks take on the hated Brooklyn Cyclones, the high A team of the Mets. I've actually seen a Cyclones game in Brooklyn, they play on Coney Island, beyond CF there is a view of an active roller coaster and if the game is boring you can watch people screaming on the coaster.

It was Star Wars night and they had Darth Vader, stormtrooper, and Kylo Ren reenactors walking the concourse and taking photos with anyone who asked for one. The Darth Vader guy was great, he was actually dropping one-liners like James Earl Jones in the original trilogy.

At the gift shop, my kid bought a pack of Blue Rocks baseball cards from 2017 for $5. It was pretty much every Blue Rocks player from that year, every coach, even the two mascots. We pulled a number of current or former major leaguers including Scott Blewitt, Richard Lovelady, and Foster Griffin. We also pulled a Wander Franco card but it turned out not to be the infamous Wander Franco who used to play for the Rays, but his brother who has the exact same name. One of the coaches for the 2017 Blue Rocks was Chris Widger, who was the backup catcher behind AJ Pierzynski on the 2005 White Sox. We'll probably end up mailing the Lovelady and Griffin cards to the Nationals in the hopes of getting them signed.

My kid also stalked Rocky Bluewinkle, the main mascot of the Blue Rocks, and had Rocky sign the Rocky card that was included in the 2017 set. Rocky has lost a lot of weight since 2017, good for him.

As for the stadium experience, it was poor. We sat on the first base side which was a huge mistake as the setting run blinded us until sunset. The stadium jumbotron was usually a batter behind the action on the field so it was hard to tell who was actually AB if you didn't have the player numbers memorized. The PA system was virtually nonexistent: it was hard to hear the announcer and they seemed to lack the ability to pipe in music. There was no walk-up music for any of the players, not even Eli Willits.

We stayed after the game for a fireworks show and there was no music for that either, which was odd. My kid still loved it.

Wilmington kids chant the pitch clock countdown in big situations. So if you're a visiting pitcher you hear a whole stadium of kids saying "five, four, three..." as the clock winds down on you. I thought that was cool.

[Natsinpwc]

Herb Pennock AKA The Squire of Kennett Square. After all this is a baseball site.

Had no idea

[imref]

thanks for sharing Count!

[wj73]

Did they bring out Mr Celery after the Blue Rocks scored? One of the more unlikely mascots, even for minor league ball.

[Count Walewski]

Did they bring out Mr Celery after the Blue Rocks scored? One of the more unlikely mascots, even for minor league ball.

Yes. My wife quickly became fascinated by Mr. Celery, an anthropomorphic celery who comes out after each and every Blue Rocks run and high-fives the fans sitting in the front row behind home plate:

https://10best.usatoday.com/awards/mr-celery-wilmington-blue-rocks/

Rocky Bluewinkle is the in-stadium mascot who goes into the stands, hangs out with kids, and presides over inter-inning entertainment. Mr. Celery seems to strictly come onto the field after a score.

There is Mr. Celery stuff everywhere all over the stadium, tons of Blue Rock fans wear the alt hats/jerseys with Mr. Celery on them, and even his Mexican alter ego Señor Celery (who wears a poncho and a sombrero) has merch both on fans and in the team store.

My wife demanded to know more about him and his background so I researched it. Going in, I assumed the answer was going to be that the Wilmington region grows a lot of celery or something. After all, they're called the Blue Rocks because this part of the country used to produce a lot of distinctively blue-tinted granite. But no, his origins are shrouded in mystery.

https://www.milb.com/news/how-mr-celery-became-a-wilmington-blue-rocks-legend-251686270

The most common story says that some time around the turn of the millennium, there was an effort to get kids in Delaware to eat more vegetables and as a result a bunch of costumed characters dressed as various vegetables appeared at a Blue Rocks game. The celery costume was either left behind or donated to the team and they've kept using him to great acclaim.

[wj73]

The last explanation is what one of the ushers told us - that they found this old celery costume in a forgotten storage area, and trotted it out one game just as a joke. But the fan reception was so positive that they kept the joke going, and now Mr Celery is a fixture there.

[Count Walewski]

On the way home from Chester County we stopped at the Hagley Museum just outside of Wilmington, DE. This was a gunpowder factory for about 125 years. It was a really compelling place and I’ve decided its worthy of a long post.

In high school chemistry I learned about Antoine Lavoisier, the world-famous chemist who discovered Oxygen. He was guillotined during the French Revolution for being too much of an aristocrat. Well he had a student named E.I. du Pont, who was forced to flee to the United States because of his ties to Lavoisier. Du Pont settled in Delaware.

Lavoisier had taught his young apprentice how to make gunpowder, so du Pont decided to go into the gunpowder business. At Hagley he found a suitable site for making gunpowder: the Brandywine River provided free hydropower, the blue granite bedrock (the same blue rocks the MiLB team is named for) meant that an accidental explosion would not create a huge crater, and there were a lot of Irishmen around willing to work for low wages in a place where accidental explosions were a concern. Amazingly, the ingredients for making gunpowder were not native to the area: du Pont had to import 85% of the components of gunpowder from Italy, South America, and India.

The gunpowder was apparently good stuff. The War Department in those days had a small, handheld mortar that they would use to test gunpowder. The US Army would only buy gunpowder that shot a cannonball 200 or more feet from the test mortar. Du Pont’s gunpowder shot it 330 feet.

The factory was closed in the 1920’s and stripped of all its scrap metal during World War II. The forest quickly reclaimed much of the land. Today Hagley is a series of brick ruins along a very beautiful stretch of the Brandywine River. The old machinist shop houses a museum with dioramas of each step in the gunpowder making process. Some parts of the process were so dangerous that humans were not allowed in the room where it happened, so some buildings have “peepholes” that allowed an Irishman to spy on the process from behind the relative safety of a thick brick wall.

(This du Pont fellow, of course, went on to sire the famous du Pont family of Delaware and the Dupont corporation that still exists)

The visitor center offers the usual maps and such, but also houses a museum only tangentially related to the du Ponts. You see until about 1870 if you wanted a patent you had to submit a small scale model of your invention. The model needed to fit into a 12x12x12 box. The Hagley visitor center has two floors filled with these models. Some are for outlandish impractical inventions like a time machine or a boat with legs, others are for famous inventions like the mason jar. The entire family will find something to be fascinated by in there.

Finally, a wall of the museum is dedicated to the former US Patent and Trademark Office in Washington DC, seemingly lamenting that this once-magnificent “temple of innovation” has been reduced to being a mere art museum.

[JCA-CrystalCity]

I  just realized that "Chemours," a DuPont spin off of part of  its chemical business, is probably a mash-up of "chemicals" and "de Nemours," du Pont's full name (E.I. du Pont de Nemours).

[wj73]

Fascinating, Count. Thanks for highlighting it. I will definitely put that on my list to visit next time I’m up that way.

[Natsinpwc]

Celery is an underrated veggie

[imref]

Celery is an underrated veggie

great for stirring bloody mary's.

[tomterp]

great for stirring bloody mary's.

And, along with onions and green bell peppers, one of the holy trinity of Cajun cooking.

[Ali the Baseball Cat]

Mr Celery FTMFW 

[wj73]

We made our way to Williamsport, PA, to visit the Little League Museum and to see the ball fields. The Museum is excellent. It’s broken up into 6 “innings”, like a Little League game. Each inning focuses on a different part of Little League. One of the innings features interactive exhibits, simulating being an outfielder, an infielder, a catcher, etc. There’s even a full size home to first base path, with a timer to tell you how fast you ran it. That was fun. I did it in 4.91 seconds, which I thought was not bad for a 70 year old with a bum ankle.


We then walked outside to the fields, which are adjacent to the Museum. Having seen it on TV so many times, I really enjoyed seeing it in person.


All in all, a great experience. We didn’t have kids with us, but the kids we did see there really seemed to enjoy it, especially the interactive inning at the Museum.

[wj73]

Spent the last few days in Scranton. Besides taking in a RailRiders v. Tides game, we visited the Anthracite Museum. It traced the history of coal mining in the region, and emphasized how the mining industry was based on immigration. Coal companies even put ads in foreign newspapers recruiting Irish, Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Welsh, Brits, etc. As was the custom of the time, they were paid low wages for backbreaking work done under brutal conditions. They were housed in company shacks, the rent for which was deducted from their pay. And in isolated areas, the only stores were company stores, like that old song I Owe My Soul to the Company Store. There was no worker’s comp or death benefits. If a man was killed in the mines, they simply wrapped his body in a sheet and dumped it on the front porch of his shack for his widow to find. The same when a child was killed in the mines - just a mangled body dumped on the front porch.

One thing I did not know was that this area was a major hub of the silk industry. Large corporations openly said that the wives/daughters of immigrant miners were a workforce to be tapped, willing to work for long hours at low wages. So while immigrant male children were sent to work at the mines as early as age 10, immigrant female children were sent to work in the silk factories as early 12. It was a cruel, brutal life for these people.

The museum highlighted the reasons that immigrants came, escaping war, famine, and/or religious discrimination. The area welcomed Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. It was a really good museum, and really highlighted the role of immigration as fundamental to this area.

[wj73]

Yesterday, we took the Lackawanna Mine Tour, where we took a mine car 300 feet into what had been an actual mine. The tour guide was the son of a man who had started working in the mine at age 10, although he was carried in the mine rolls as being 16. That was not uncommon.

Before you descend, you can watch a video about the history of the mining industry, the brutal conditions under which the miners lived and worked, and how the mine owners, led by J.P. Morgan, felt that maximizing profits was their only goal, miner safety and welfare be damned. Conditions in the late 19th century got so bad that it culminated in the mine strike of 1902. President Teddy Roosevelt himself intervened on behalf of the miners to get them an immediate 10% raise, and formed an independent commission to investigate the causes of the strike. That was the start of labor laws to protect workers, including child labor laws, the right of workers to form unions, and other worker protections.

After the video, we descended into the mine for a hour or so tour. Our guide was excellent, and walking in those cold wet dark mines for an hour gave you a hint of what life was like in the mines. Dangerous explosions, cave ins, and methane and other gases were a constant danger. Men often had to work on their bellies in tunnels as smalls as 18” high.

I learned that those vertical wood posts are NOT there to prop up the roof. Instead they are an early warning system for cave ins. If the ceiling starts lowering, the pressure on those posts will start them cracking. That noise was a signal to run.

And while we all know about the canaries in the coal mine, the miners also brought rats into the mines, fed them, and encouraged them to breed and roam freely. Rats have an excellent sense of smell and could detect gas leaks before humans. If the rats all started running out of a tunnel, the miners ran, too.

It was blessedly cool that far underground - 55 degrees. We were glad to have our jackets!!


Definitely a worthwhile experience to be in a real mine. I can highly recommend going there if you’re in the Scranton area.

[English Natsie]

For the interested, there is a long-form 'American Experience' on this subject - 'The MIne Wars'.

[Natsinpwc]

I had a robot serve me a cappacino at the Space needle gift shop the other day in Seattle. He must have a high salary cause it was $9.95

[varoadking]

I had a robot serve me a cappacino at the Space needle gift shop the other day in Seattle. He must have a high salary cause it was $9.95

There seem to be a lot of robots in Seattle these days.  I think they're robots...they could be zombies...