...maybe book a long weekend trip to NYC at the end of the month. Have some skymiles to burn. What's a good area to focus on for lodging? I've only been twice and others made the plans both times, but this time I'm in charge. Probably be going to see Sonic Youth in Brooklyn and possibly a Mets game, so I'll kind of be all over. Centrality (maybe?) and affordability (I know, I know) are important but I guess I'd also like to be in a relatively nice area.
Citifield is an oversized minor league ballpark. Go to the new Yankee Stadium, Citifield is a veritable shit hole.
As for lodging, I got no idea. Like, I live at a point in Queens that is a six minute drive to Manhattan and they've opened up two motels right here, but they're Holiday Inns, so they are what they are, but probably pretty cheap. I think you should probably suck it up and lodge in the city. It must be mad cool to do that, walk out your hotel onto the streets of Manhattan, light up a Nat Sherman, adjust your fedora and strut.
Funny story about Citifield, I slam that place pretty hard in conversation all the time. It really irks me that when the two new stadiums opened, everyone was saying Citi is nicer than the new Yankee Stadium, including Yanks fans. It was not true, since Citifield looks like a jock strap cup from the outside, the field shape is the most hideous polygon ever in the history of fields, the food is overrated, it's too short and wide, there are exposed steel girders everywhere, all the patrons look like adopted children [no offense, adoptees?], they play the worst music, the Mets are fuckin joke and their fans for the most part are absolutely despicable... but that's another thread altogether.
Anyway, I wanted to revisit this year to renew my dislike and was discussing with some dudes a CF trip in the next two weeks. They were like, "How to get tickets???," so I said, "Who cares, you can pretty much just pick up CF tickets straight out of the gutter." They're so easy to get. Well last Thursday one of those dudes messages me, "Wanna go to the Braves Mets game tomorrow night." Turns out he got TWENTY FREE TICKETS from his dad's office. It was as close to picking tickets up out of the gutter as I could have gotten. So I went, bet on the Braves and they won, hah. Great Mets trip.