Living the Bubbly Side of Life….that is what I do.

And I’m a firm believer in celebrating and celebrating all the time.

So, needless to say, when planning my birthday, I decided I needed to celebrate BIG…which is my norm. I planned it at Rogers Centre in Toronto, Canada to watch the Blue Jays vs the White Sox.

Now, checking off every MLB stadium is on my bucket list and this stadium needed its check-mark.

This stadium offers an experience like no other. You can actually make a hotel reservation at the Toronto Marriott City Centre and reserve a room that overlooks the outfield.

Now, I specifically reserved a Guest Room, 1 King or 1 Queen, Sofa Bed, and Field View for a very important reason… it had a living room to hold my birthday party.

After schlepping a White Sox pail, napkins, cups, plastic helmets and plates in my Baseballism bag from Portland to Chicago, then Chicago to Toronto, that living room was hugely important to me.

(Side note, in Portland they thought the pail was a garbage can and were quite confused why that was in my Baseballism carry on bag. At O’hare, no one even paused or thought twice.)

The room at the Marriott did not disappoint. In fact it provided such an amazing experience for both the HUGE baseball fan (that’s me) and the not so huge baseball fan.

After getting the windows opened, it was quite awesome to look out and be able to experience the field hours before game time. When the only people there were the players and field maintenance staff.

We had a lot of fun with the White Sox players as they were happy to have a home team fan there (with a big mouth). I have always said, go to away games, you get a lot more player interaction that way.

A huge plus to this room is that you can bring in food and drinks. So, while the room may seem a bit pricey, you’re saving money on game tickets, ballpark food and drinks. So, for us, it almost broke even. Our room could hold up to 8 people and in that case you would break even or come out ahead for sure.

After munching on some yummy snacks and popping some delicious Duck Pond 1996 Sparkling Wine, gates to the ballpark opened and even though you were in this room in a hotel, you really did feel the atmosphere of the stadium.

People were worried that I would miss out since I really truly love baseball, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. The only thing we couldn’t see were the jumbotrons.

At one point, we did turn the TV on in the room because there was a lot of talk between the managers and the umps and it was hard to tell what was going on.

So, that was kind of cool that we could hear what was going on. Because if you’re just sitting in the stands, you have no clue either until it’s all over and you still don’t really know what the issue was all about.

Since I did experience their restaurant for lunch and for the game it was packed with people starting around 3pm not to mention, I had been stalking Junked Food Co on Instagram for weeks, so we had to order that in.

Surprisingly, delivery was relatively fast and we at mac-n-cheese, more mac-n-cheese, mac-n-cheese fries and then dessert, of course. We had 2 different types of cookie dough and this decadent Oreo waffle.

We laughed that this paired so well with Argyle’s Black Brut Sparkling Wine.

After the game was over, it was so wild to be able to watch the stadium get cleaned and ready for the next game. The lights stayed on until 11:50pm. There were so many people involved in clean up, prepping the mound and bullpens, etc.

We were warned that they would be power washing the seats, however, we just saw and (kind of) heard them using leaf blowers. We were lucky that our room was directly over center field so we had no seats below us. Though, they did provide ear plugs if needed.

In fact, when we woke up at 8am, we took a look and there were still people cleaning up the stands. It seemed to be an all night process that required hundreds of people.

Honestly, this is truly a one of a kind experience. If you are a baseball fan, you have to put Rogers Centre on your list. And book a room at the Marriott to make this a truly unique baseball viewing experience.

A White Sox victory made this the perfect birthday celebration.