NY/PA Korg Travel Follies (A Rainy Night at Big Shea)

As some of my regular readers know, I was a fairly serious keyboardist during college, playing accompaniment for my campus ministry’s choir and carting around a cheap 5-octave Casio unit in the back of my truck to rehearsals of my a cappella group. Since I moved out of my parents’ house before New Year’s, I’ve been suffering from a severe lack of instrument. Thus I’ve had my eyes on Ebay for 88-weighted-key Korg synthesizers, preferably used models from the 3-4 year old Trinity line.

An 88-key Trinity Pro X being sold out of Montrose, NY (about 40 light-traffic minutes north of NYC) appeared about two weeks ago. There were two problems with it, though: (1) the seller was brand-new, so there was no evidence immediately available as to whether he was honest, and (2) it didn’t come with a case, which would leave it open to all the abuse UPS could muster in transit. Putting two and two together, assuming I could win the auction, there was only one way to ensure that I would get what I paid for:

ROADTRIP!!!

And thus my weekend was born.

I was able to take off Friday, which opened up the possibility of a side trip to Shea Stadium for Friday night’s game between the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals. This brought my personal tally of major league stadiums visited to five (two this year) and gave me something better to do on Friday night than sit in a suburban hotel room and watch TV.

So, without further ado, thoughts from the weekend, in roughly chronological order:

• In general, you don’t pay tolls to go into New Jersey, but you do pay them to go out. This always makes me think of NJ as a roach motel… and much of the state is about as clean as one, too. I do have to give them some credit for the New Jersey Turnpike, though.
• Total northbound tolls, Richmond to my hotel near LaGuardia and Shea: $16.10. Why couldn’t Virginia have signed onto EZPass instead of having to run its own Smart Tag operation? It’s even the same freakin’ hardware! I mean, it’s only the entire Northeast that uses it, and it’s not like any Virginians ever travel north at all.
• Ballpark trivia: Shea is now the fifth-oldest stadium in the major leagues (behind Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Yankee Stadium, and Dodger Stadium). This kinda shocked me at first, until I realized what its contemporaries were: Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, the Astrodome in Houston, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, Municipal Stadium in Cleveland — all of which are either gone or soon to be. Unlike many of those stadiums as they neared their ends, though, Shea remains a nice place to watch a game — its biggest problem, in my opinion, is that not enough of the seats are covered (only about the upper quarter of the upper deck is covered, plus half of the mezzanine).
• In a little over a decade of actually paying attention, the principal structural difference I’ve noticed between Northern and Southern suburbs is that suburbs in the North are simply older. Most of them appear to have been going concerns as small towns long before they were drawn into their now-parent city’s gravitational arc. While that is sometimes true in the South (Marietta, GA immediately comes to mind, as does Salem, VA… even my own hometown of Midlothian, VA was a coal-mining town before it became a Richmond suburb, and the south side of Richmond was originally a separate city called Manchester), the old parts have generally been overwhelmed with new development. In extreme cases, the old stuff has either been destroyed or moved out of the way — in Short Pump where I live now, the structures that once stood near the intersection of West Broad St and Pump/Pouncey Tract Rd have been moved 5 miles west to Field Day of the Past, out past the growth area of suburban Short Pump.
• AT&T Wireless greatly exaggerates its coverage along I-84 in northeastern Pennsylvania. The map shows it picking up at the PA/NY border, when in reality you’re going to have to get within 20 miles of Scranton before you get coverage back. This was important because…
• I got a call just before crossing the Hudson north of Peekskill from a co-worker who needed some help with a system. He eventually decided to go into work, which would take him an hour, and he would call me back from there. An hour and a half later, I wound up standing in the mountaintop parking lot of WNEP-16 in Scranton, PA, talking him through logging into my desktop PC and performing a couple operations with a software package he hadn’t seen before.
• Pennsylvania roads just suck. The guys who came up with the Pennsylvania Turnpike had a good idea, but as best as I can tell, it’s been all downhill since then. If my car needs suspension work in the next year, I’m sending the bill to PennDOT. Never mind that I was doing… er… slightly higher than the speed limit.

But my run was successful in the end, and now I have a new toy sitting in my computer room. A $3500 instrument for under $1250 including pedals, speakers, and roadtrip expenses to pick it up? I’ll take it.