Devils, Movie Stars, and Bulls

We started off our vacation proper by heading to breakfast at Elmo's Diner in Durham - no relation to the Sesame Street character. I had some fantastic biscuits and gravy, along with a side of cinnamon apples (basically apple pie filling). Thanks to Ito for the suggestion. Ava enjoyed playing with a spoon, and we fed her sweet potato puffs (sort of like star-shaped cheerios, but softer and easier for babies to eat). Ava had a little bit of trouble figuring out how to eat the puffs in her mouth at first, but as the trip wore on she started to become a real pro.

Our first destination was the Duke Gardens, which they refer to as the Crown Jewel of Duke. In addition to tons of flowers and plants, the gardens also include a huge pond filled with ducks.
The Gardens are located on East Campus, so we headed to the main campus to wander around a bit. Although the main student commons were a bit depressing - dark, drab concrete interior, with a cramped student store - I did find a Mike Kryzyewksi bobblehead (with money going to charity), and the rest of the campus was very pretty, especially the Duke Chapel. The chapel, done in an English, pseudo-Gothic style towers over the campus, and is filled with amazing stained glass windows.

One of the themes of our trip was trying to schedule things around Ava's nap schedule. Our main tactic was to try to get her to sleep in the car, since it's not like we could just plop down our Pack-N-Play in the middle of the Duke campus (although I'm sure the sorority girls who were putting together a charity pancake breakfast would have adored her). On this day, our late morning trip took us to Smithfield, the home town of Ava Gardner and home to the Ava Gardner Museum, which is about an hour away. For those of you who don't know, Ava Gardner was a movie star in the 40s and 50s, who received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Mogambo (alongside Clark Gable and Grace Kelly), and who was married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. The museum did a great job of telling her life story through videos, photos, paintings, and costumes.

After visiting Smithfield, we headed back to Durham for a late afternoon baseball game between the Durham Bulls (AAA Tampa Bay) and the Scranton-Wilkes Barre Yankees (AAA NYY). After the movie Bull Durham was released in 1988, the team's popularity increased, and they built a beautiful new ballpark in 1995, and later moved from being a A team to a AAA team. The new park is located right next to an old tobacco warehouse area, which has been redeveloped into a shopping area. Rather than getting normal seats, we got seats in the outfield lawn so Ava could crawl around. In addition to the lawn, the park features a huge wall in left field called the "Blue Monster," what appears to be an office building hovering over the outfield, and the famous "Hit Bull, Win Steak" sign above the Blue Monster. Although we didn't get to see a Bulls homer (and the corresponding smoke coming out of the Bulls nostrils), we did get a good 2-0 win for the home team. More importantly, Ava had a blast crawling around on the grass - even though we had to bundle her up in 2 jackets and a hat due to the chill that came down when the sun went behind the clouds. To top it off, the Bulls have some of the best food options in baseball, including a BBQ Dog - a footlong hot dog topped with pulled pork and cole slaw.

After the game, we made a quick detour to the historic Durham Athletic Park to check out the old stadium where the movie was filmed. More than a bit run down, it was still cool to see, and we snapped a few quick pictures before heading in for the night.