What time zone am I in?

Working on a long trip at the moment - first Toronto, now Seattle. So far so good, but the biggest night for me is Tuesday night, because it's a non-televised game, so my listenership back in Houston will be significantly larger than normal.

Friday
Anyway, we left for Toronto early Friday morning - 8:50 flight meant waking up at 6 or so. Not cool! My boss (LG) and I had to connect through Newark, which is way the heck out of the way. Once there, we had to transfer from Terminal C to Terminal A via shuttlebus, which was annoying, and Terminal A had no lunch food. Neither flight had much in the way of entertainment, but LG and I did use the time on the first flight to brainstorm some things for work, so that was productive.

We actually arrived in Toronto just after the team, which had taken a direct flight leaving four hours after ours, and thus sat through customs lines and the bus ride through traffic with the guys. We were staying at SkyDome (now the Rogers Centre), which was cool except for the fact that we arrived as all the fans were arriving for the Blue Jays-Red Sox game.

Naturally I proceeded to go to the game, although it turned out I needed to activate my credit card for a foreign country, so I had to use American dollars to buy my ticket. I then got put between a father and his two kids on the left, who knew a lot about baseball, and a father with son and multiple friends on the right, who knew a lot less about baseball. I ended up talking occasionally to one of the kids on the right, who was at his first game and referred to me as his "Answer Dictionary" or some such term. Fun to be back at SkyDome, which is nowhere near as cool now as it was on my first visit in 1994. I have pictures, but I'll have to get back to Houston before I can post.

The roof takes 30 minutes to open or close (it was closed on this night), or 25 more minutes than the one at Minute Maid, I think. Almost every row of seats had a bar just in front of it, as if to make everybody feel they were in box seats. In reality, the bars only served to further limit leg room. I'll only make one more point - there was a huge LED screen in center field, but the actual linescore seemed to be hidden on one board in right field. The kid next to me (The Question Asker) couldn't find it for a while and had trouble understanding it even after I pointed it out and explained what R, H, and E stood for. Of course, he also couldn't understand why Roy Halladay wasn't pitching.

But I was glad I went. Clay Buckholz pitched very well for Boston, even though Ricky Romero struck out eight for Toronto. I think I could have gotten some free pizza out of those Romero strikeouts, but I didn't cash in the next day.

Saturday
Saturday morning was another early one, because I was taking the early ride to the stadium at 9:15 a.m. for a 1 p.m. ET game. That meant getting up somewhere in the 7 o'clock range, Central Time, AND missing a pre-game interview.

But it turned out to be worth it, because OF COURSE, the ISDN lines in the broadcast booth, reputed to be perfectly functional, were deemed "Inactive" by my machine and prevented me from setting up a broadcast in an ideal format. Luckily, I've become used to this, and I knew I could get on the air via phone line. That all went well, except for the phone line's annoying habit of cutting out at 10 past every hour (thankfully that fell during halftime and post-game, respectively, so we missed none of the game).

I'll spare you the game details, but we gutted out an important 1-1 tie on the road, scoring a goal with about 15 minutes left to tie it. As a broadcaster, the goal was a bit of a surprise, because I was still in the process of saying who the player was and that he was onside when hetookashotandthegoaliesaveditandthereboundwentin all in a hurry like that before I could react. So I ended up saying "he bundles it over the line," which is a very English way of saying it, I feel, AND omits the fact that the first shot was saved, because by the time I came to the shot, the crowd reaction already made it clear something had happened. So I had to cover that a few seconds later after properly celebrating and identifying the goal. Definitely challenging, and probably not one for my all-time highlight reel. But great to get a tie on the road.

It was cool in Toronto - highs in the 70s - so I spent most of the weekend wearing a windbreaker, which was nice. Although it apparently is not cool to wear a team windbreaker around town when you're not working, but it was the only pair of sleeves I brought, so I was stuck wearing it.

Went out that night looking for a restaurant at which I could watch the USA-Panama game, which was on GolTV Canada. Tried Gretzky's at first but was intimidated by the atmosphere and my solitude, so I moved on to an Irish pub where I just sat at the bar and watched the game intently. Made for a decent evening, and the U.S. won in overtime.

Sunday
On Sunday, I had to wake up at 6 a.m. to leave at 7 a.m. and fly to Seattle. Which meant I woke up at 3 a.m. in the time zone I was going to. Yikes! The lines in the Toronto airport were terrible, they changed the gate without me knowing it, and my debit card once again failed to work for breakfast, which meant I got worthless Canadian change and was forced to exchange it for U.S. dollars at a horrific rate. Not exactly a great morning.

But Air Canada has a sweet setup on its jets - a power outlet at your seat and individual touchscreens with movies. After everybody had been seated, I got switched up one row into an exit row because there had been a little girl there. Normally, just like first class, we're expected to give up exit rows for taller players whose legroom is more important than our own. I looked around for one, couldn't make eye contact since they were all seated, and forgot about it.

On the flight itself, I slept for a bit, worked for maybe 2.5 hours, and watched the movie Glory (on my computer, because their movies were not that good) for the rest of the flight. Got off the flight and prepared to take a train to baggage claim, when a couple of our players walked by, casually conversing:

"Boy, I'm feeling stiff after that flight, aren't you?"
"Absolutely. Especially after playing 90 minutes on Saturday. Would have been nice to have some extra leg room, don't you think?"
"No joke. An exit row really would have been nice for that flight."

And that was just the beginning. I think the best line may have been, "What, did you need room to stretch your fingers?" I also took heat during the trip because I let on to one of our coaches, from Glasgow, that RBG preferred Edinburgh to Glasgow. Big mistake. He hasn't stopped talking about it since, even when RBG emailed me that she actually did like Glasgow a lot.

Oh, the mistakes we make.

Anyway, so we arrived in Seattle in the early afternoon already dead tired, and I decided I needed to stay up until at least 11 p.m. to get on Pacific Time. So it was a long afternoon of a little work and a lot of watching TV/doing nothing. Walked around town and dined by myself, watched the ESPYs, stayed up til 11, and crashed.

That's the first part of the trip, at least, getting me from Central to Eastern to Pacific Time.