Friday, October 17
Steve: Being in France on the day of a 7th game of a Red Sox series against the Yankees was something we hadn't quite anticipated when we planned our travels. The big question was how to "watch" the game, since the game was starting at 2:00AM France time. We eventually decided that David and I would get up at 4:30AM to check the score on the internet, and we'd decide from there what to do. If it was a blowout (unlikely), we'd simply go back to sleep and check the final score at a more reasonable hour. If it was close, then we'd probably stay up and agonize in front of our laptop screen.
As things turned out, it was 5-2 Boston in the 8th inning with Pedro still
on the mound - perfect! We'd simply have to stay up 30 minutes or so, get
the final word of Boston's stunning victory via ESPN Gamecast, and go back
to bed smug in the thoughts of our upcoming World Series. Obviously, we didn't
anticipate the 90+ minutes of agony that followed… We did, however, discover
an entirely new use for AOL Instant Messenger. With ESPN Gamecast over an
inning behind real-time (totally unacceptable for us), we ended up getting
an instant message pitch-by-pitch update from my Dad in Boston! David and
I sat there (with Zeus asleep on David's lap) in anticipation as the message
"lbkoppel is typing" would appear on the bottom of the AOL window,
followed by 
Dad's
latest update (including expert commentary on the pitch location and even
the demeanor of the players!). In the picture above, you can actually see
the ESPN Gamecast and the AOL Instant Message windows. When the final message
(something like: "sorry, 1st pitch Boone home run, Yankees win 6-5")
appeared, we simply said goodbye and went back to sleep. As I told David,
there are some things that are just not meant to be. Apparently a World Series
victory for the Red Sox is one of those things.
Today was the first day of our entire trip where the weather really prevented us from exploring. It was cold and rainy, and we decided to spend the day here packing, cleaning, reading and doing errands. This will hopefully allow us to have some additional time to do something here tomorrow morning before we need to drive to Montpelier for our train to Barcelona.
Distance Walked: not enough to count…
