Waffles, Exploring, Free Pizza, and Baseball

Tuesday was our "free day" and I made sure to jam pack my day with things to do. In some way, the exploring began on Monday night. We are staying in Alameda, CA, an island which is about an hour and a half east of San Francisco (and a great city). Monday night, a few of us walked down to the local movie theater to see the newest X-Men movie. What we didn't fully realize was how historic the movie theater was. When we walked in, we were greeted with an ornate and beautiful theater. The movie was excellent and I won't forget that theater any time soon!

Tuesday morning, my day began with meeting up with my great aunt and uncle (and avid readers of my blog), Doug and Debby, for breakfast. They live about an hour away from San Francisco and stopped by for a visit. Our hotel is in Alameda and so for breakfast we went downtown to a cute diner called Ole's Waffle Shop. Not only were the waffles delicious, it was also amazing to see and catch up with Doug and Debby. We had a wonderful time and I was so glad things worked out.

Post breakfast, I spent some time wandering Alameda, checking out some of their shops (including this amazing bookstore and another vintage/used store with books, movies, and records), spending some time laying in the sun on the beach looking out at the bay, and even a little swim at our hotel pool. All in all, an excellent day. The group regrouped and before heading to the coliseum, we needed dinner. At yesterday's game, the grand slam by the A's meant a local pizza joint would give us a free personal pizza. We stopped by, ordered pizza and ate it on the way to the stadium. Our seats this time we in the bleachers and we sure had a different perspective on the game.

We ended up seating behind some bleacher regulars who brought all sorts of noisemakers to the game. While I thought we had great seats (a nice perspective of the whole field and especially of the batter) the people around us were sure distracting. The most distracting was this couple in front of us where the woman clearly had no idea what was going on in the game, being more interested in the man she was with and what food she had recently ordered. 

This game was very different from the one we saw on Memorial Day. First, O.Co was not sold out and we probably saw one of our lowest attendance yet. No grand slams and this time, the A's did not get a victory. Coming into the game, I was told to expect a good game between both the A's and the Tiger's number one pitchers -- Sonny Gray (A's) vs. Max Scherzer (Tiger's). While the pitching was good (both Gray and Scherzer lasted six innings), there was definitely an offensive front I was not expecting. The Tigers scored two runs in the first inning and the A's answered back with two runs in the second. Cabrera's homerun in the third put the Tigers in the lead and an RBI double from Avila brought in another run for the Tigers in the fourth. When the A's were up in the bottom of the forth, it was Jaso's homerun that gave the A's a 5-4 lead. From there, the Tigers kept coming back with a homerun from Hunter in the seventh and good base running in the eighth to bring in one final run.  

We return to our hotel late (it was a three hour game and typical CA traffic) and went straight to bed. We have a long drive ahead of us today to get to LA in time for our night Dodgers game.