With baseball season in full swing and the weather being so nice here in New England, we recently decided to check out the Fenway Park Tour to get a behind-the-scenes look at a Boston landmark. The tour costs $12 for adults, $11 for seniors and $10 for children 4-15. It leaves every hour from 9 AM until 4 PM (or three hours before game time, whichever is earlier), so there are plenty of times to check this one out during a visit to the city.

The tour starts in the souvenir shop on Yawkey Way, and after a quick security screening, you walk in a large group throughout the park, learning about its history and many interesting facts about the team. Our tour guide was energetic and knowledgeable about Fenway and the history of the Red Sox. She even antagonized the one Yankees fan in our group of 100 with Yankees commentary throughout the entire tour, which added some comic relief.

Our tour had four main stops, each of which gave you the opportunity to sit down or stand and listen to the various facts and stories the tour guide offered up through a megaphone. Before the first stop, you get your photo taken by the Fenway Fan Photo team, and it is conveniently available to you at the end of your tour for purchase. Our picture didn’t come out that great so we ended up having fellow tour-goers take a few snapshots of us with our own camera.

The first stop was the upper deck of right field, which offers great views of the entire park. After 10 minutes or so of Fenway stories and some Q&A, we then headed over the Pavilion Club area in upper left field, where our entire group took seats and listened in to more Fenway facts. We learned about the history of the Green Monster and the red chair, amongst other cool stories. Since it was game day, we even got to see some batting practice. From this area, we headed over to the Green Monster seats, which are the most coveted in the park. Everyone got a chance to sit and enjoy the sights from this vantage point. Our last stop was the left-field grandstands, which are the smallest seats in the park and not very comfortable.

Overall, this was a great experience for us and our son. There was plenty of time allowed to take pictures and check out some of the nooks and crannies of America’s most beloved ball park. We recommend calling the tour phone number (617-226-6666) before planning your trip to see if there are any changes to the schedule. They are now offering batting practice tours as well, but no information is available on the details of this yet.

When our son gets older, we’ll plan a Fenway day where we do both a tour and game in the same day.

Dad Says: Seeing Fenway with very few people walking around was great fun, and the history and facts were very interesting to hear. I really would have liked to see the clubhouse or the press box. Hopefully they will continue to expand this tour in the future.

Mom Says: The tour was about an hour and it flew by. Don’t worry about rushing to be the front people in the group as you won’t hear or see anything any better than the last people. Trust me – we were the last people!

Web Site: http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 2:27 am and is filed under Parks, Places to Go, Sites. If you use RSS, you can subscribe to the RSS feed , or if you would rather receive an e-mail, please subscribe to the e-mail in the lower right hand corner of this page. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.