Matthew Monday: Our Trip to Scranton, PA

Concerning our big decision on which baseball park to visit next (for those that may not recall or know, we are on a lifetime father/son mission to attend all the major league ball parks together), we decided on Pittsburg.  But, Matthew wondered, if we could also go to a AAA team ball park, since we had never been to a Triple A stadium.  We have been to several Single A stadiums, and of course we have been to Major League stadiums, but never a AAA or a AA.  Of course I said sure.  I had not either.  So I suggested that on the way to Pittsburg we could go through Scranton Pennsylvania and see the Yankee’s AAA team, the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders.  That’s quite a mouthful.  Scranton is the main city in the Northeast Pennsylvania area, but the stadium is closer to a suburb called Wilkes-Barre.  I should mention that Scranton is the birth place of President Joe Biden, but that had nothing to do with the decision.

Posts on Pittsburg and the Pirates game will be forthcoming.

So what was there to do in Scranton to kill the day before the game?  There was the Nay Aug Park nearby that had some hiking trails.  So we decided to go there.  The park turned out to be a complex of sorts which has a waterfall as its main hiking attraction.  So we decided we would hike to the waterfall, which was about a mile or so away.  It’s not a very large park and quite manageable.

The park also had a couple of museums within the complex, but one caught our attention since it was near where we had parked the car.  It was a coal mining museum at the mouth of a closed mining tunnel.  Here are some pictures.

 

The trek into that opening was not very deep but being underground is weird.  Here are a couple of pictures.

The Scranton mines were famous for having Anthrocite Coal, which contains among the most concentrated energy of the various coal types.  According to Wikipedia, Anthrocite “has the highest carbon content, the fewest impurities, and the highest energy density of all types of coal and is the highest ranking of coals.”  We got a lecture on this from the guide that was there.  Apparently Anthrocite Coal was very important to the industrial development of the United States, and it could only be found in the Scranton area

The hike to the waterfall was mostly on a downward slope to the waterfall, but of course we had to go back up to come back.  This was a beautiful summer day on August 1^st.  Here are some pictures of the hike, Matthew leading the way.

    

 

And then finally a full picture of the Nay Auk Gorge and waterfall.

 It was well worth the hike!

The game that night was between the RailRiders (which is a reference to trollies which were popular in Northeastern PA at one time) and the Louisville Bats, the Triple A team of the Cincinnati Reds.  The Triple A stadium did not look too much bigger than a Single A.  It was perhaps a shade larger but it did not have any upper decks like Major League parks have.  Here are a couple of pictures of the stadium.

I should also mention the price of the tickets were quite economical.  I think they were $17 per ticket, which is much cheaper than our Single A team on Staten Island.  If you’re in the Scranton area, do go to a game.

It was some sort of Hispanic culture theme the night of that game.  It was a wild, high scoring game where the Bats beat the RailRiders 10-8.  It was very enjoyable.