His name was Joe Malloy.
Ol’ Joe as I would like to think his friends call him, came into our lives this past weekend. It was only for a brief few moments, but his memory will last a lifetime.
Three of us — myself, Rod and Marc went to Philly for a baseball game. We had some other plans on this short trip, but baseball was the main thing. See, Rod had gifted me tickets to this Phillies game for Christmas. And with many points built up, we got hotels, too.
I’ll get to the other details in a moment. For now, let me talk about Joe Malloy.
‘Twas Sunday morning and we left the hotel in search of a breakfast place I had found and researched. The place had decent reviews and it had what I wanted — scrapple. See, there aren’t any joints around me where you can get scrapple, so if I am in Philly or that area, score.
Herein lies the issue — my TomTom GPS system was being quite bitchy and wouldn’t allow me to put the address in. We tried and tried, but for some reason, the road wasn’t even on there. We found a similar road, albeit without the “West,” but we thought that would work.
It didn’t.
We got to the area the GPS wanted us to be at and there’s nothing. No breakfast joint. Nothing. We started to turn around and that’s when Joe came into our lives.
Marc pulled up to Joe, who was walking down the street. The idea? Ask for some directions to this joint.
Unfortunately, Joe said he hadn’t eaten there before.
Fortunately, however, Joe did know where it was.
Score!
There’s more unfortunate, however. See, it would seem Joe knew where this place was. He then proceeded to tell us how to get there. Go back down to this road, take it for a bit until you hit the trolley tracks, then look for a BP (gas station) on the left and the trolley station on the right.
If we got there, we’d be closer.
During him telling us these actions, he asked us to make sure we were paying attention. Then he blabbed about something else. And told us we needed to make sure we understood his name.
Or the meaning of his name.
Considering he didn’t tell us the meaning of his name, how the heck were we supposed to remember it. Maybe we were supposed to ask the people at the breakfast joint? I dunno. He never told us. He just wandered off.
And then we got out of there.
We tried Joe’s directions, but we got confused. We went back to the hotel, found a way from there and eventually found this place. The breakfast, for the record, was excellent and I’d definitely eat there again.
From there, we headed to a geocache in Delaware so I could color in that state. As we started heading that way, via the GPS, something looked odd. We got to the end of the road where the breakfast place was, and what did we see? A BP and the trolley station. Turns out Joe was quite right.
Amazing.
The trip, overall, was excellent.
We saw baseball, with good seats. It’s always nice to watch a game with friends. The guy behind us was obnoxious and made sure he told everyone how this was wrong or this and that. Annoying. Just watch the game already.
This Phils lost, unfortunately. But I got to see Cole Hamels pitch at the major league level for the first time. He also homered, as did Ryan Howard and Chase Utley.
We ate at Geno’s Steaks (a separate post about this will run this week), and grabbed some tasty during other parts of the trips. We also stopped at a nice bar near our hotel, where I had the chance to sit back and enjoy a Guinness (though the bartender put it in a frosty pint… bad move).
I’ll look forward to my next trip down to Philly. It’s always a fun time to get away and catch a game or whatever else.
Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!