It’s not my imagination that it’s been surprisingly cold on Ted’s and my Spring Break Road Trip. On Wednesday night while we were there, Jacksonville tied a record low temperature of 28 degrees. The record was set in 1871–146 years ago! Today, however, the car thermometer hit 73 degrees on our way to Jupiter. We walked around the area near our hotel without jackets and ate dinner outside without jackets. After eight days of travel, we have reached Southern Spring at last!
Our hotel is handy to the stadium for tomorrow’s Cardinals/Mets spring training game.
The hotel is the green building on the left; the stadium is the red brick on the right. Yes, we’ll have to walk all the way across the street.
We arrived early enough to walk around in the warm weather for awhile before dinner, so we checked out the stadium and the nearby restaurant/shopping area. The Cardinals and the Marlins share this stadium for spring training. We talked to a resident of Jupiter who told us that when the Marlins play in the stadium, parking is plentiful, but when the Cardinals play, parking is hard to find. Dedicated Cardinals fans fill the 4,000-seat stadium.
Here’s the main gate to enter Roger Dean Stadium.
We’re hoping the Cardinals’ batters will send some flying objects out of the field during tomorrow’s game.
Today is St. Patrick’s Day and the Marlins had a ball game, so there were lots of people in the area. Many of them were in green St. Patrick’s Day t-shirts. One street was obviously going to be the party street tonight. There were games set up, sidewalk vendors, live bands, and lots of restaurants and bars. There were also many policemen–I assume to handle the D&D’s that are likely this evening. Families with younger children settled on blankets and in lawn chairs in the amphitheater area, leaving the party street to the party people.
The party street with St. Patrick’s Day revelers. It was still early, but it was already very noisy and getting very crowded.
The family fun area, where the boisterous voices of green beer drinkers were replaced with the squeals of younger children.
When we decided it was time to eat, we selected a restaurant on a street filled with more “adult” diners than the party street restaurants and had some awesome bread, beef tips with fettucini, and peach melba for dessert. Yum!
Our more sedate restaurant. The empty table in the center was ours.
When we go to the game tomorrow, for the first time on our trip, we’re looking forward to wearing short-sleeved shirts and no jackets instead of long-sleeved shirts and fleece-lined jackets. We’ve already unpacked the sunscreen. Yes!!