Boston

Last spring, my husband started floating the idea of going up to Boston for a Sox game. He'd tried to take the boys last summer, while visiting his folks in NH, but the game was rained out.

Things started to fall into place when a pal of his had some seats available. Really good seats. Like, "look Ma, look at me waving like a buffoon while I talk on my cell phone" seats. Add that to a cheap flight from Richmond to Logan, throw in some Marriot hotel points, and you've got Labor Day Weekend in Boston.

And so it was that we found ourselves in Boston this weekend, of all weekends. Two gorgeous days in a really great city, with two boys old enough to walk around without too much whining. A truly hysterical (if not completely historical) trolley tour driver who had us falling out of our seats laughing. A smattering of actual history in the form of a stop to see Old Ironsides. And a city full of people who understand that "'R's ah fah losahs".

And the icing on the cake: Fenway Park.

We hopped the T from our hotel to the park and joined the throngs of fans descending upon the Fens. We settled in to our ridiculously amazing seats and started flagging down vendors. Ryan vowed to eat six Fenway Franks, but luckily his imagination was much bigger than his stomach. John, in a statement he would later gleefully regret, mumble-grumbled that the pitcher was some kid called up from Pawtucket. We took tons of pictures, just missed two foul balls, and chanted "Papi! Papi!" as part of Red Sox Nation.

At the start of the game, I looked at the Sox pitcher and thought to myself, "My god, he looks twelve." Long about the fourth inning, I turned to John and asked, "have the O's had any baserunners yet?" He looked at me curiously, then his face lit up with realization that the kid had pitched four hitless innings. Ok, that's cool, right?

Then, of course, came the fifth inning, when things got a little shaky, and I wondered if my veiled verbal acknowledgement had been a jinx. But after the Sox escaped that inning with the no-hitter intact, we began to hope that we were about to witness something spectacular.

And spectacular it was. As most of you know by now, Clay Bucholz pitched a no hitter in only his second major league start. With a little help from his teammates (hello, Dustin Pedroia!) and under the brilliant direction of Jason Veritek, he did what only twelve other pitchers have ever done in Fenway Park's 100 year history.

And we got to see it happen, alongside 40,000 fans on a gorgeous warm night at the greatest ballpark in the country, when the Sox called up some kid from Pawtucket.