Dodger Stadium

There’s a reason former manager Tommy Lasorda dubbed this place “Blue Heaven on Earth”: Dodger Stadium truly feels like someplace special. Built in 1962 (a few years after the L.A. Dodgers left Brooklyn) but somehow now the third-oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, the stadium is filled with handsome old and new midcentury-inspired details: Its zigzagging outfield awnings and hexagonal scoreboards stand out in sharp relief to the palm tree–lined hills and hazy mountains beyond the outfield. (If you don’t mind the sun exposure, the upper decks offer some pretty remarkable views.) Incremental upgrades, like a proper center field plaza and lushly landscaped exterior pathways, continue to improve the 56,000-person stadium, and condiment-covered Dodger Dogs and giveaways (Hello Kitty night is a perennial fave) pack in even the most casual fans.

But things are not perfect in Chavez Ravine: The traffic is notoriously terrible. There are five different gates you can drive into, and expect all of them to come to a near standstill in the hour or so leading up to a game. The sea of terraced parking lots that surround the stadium is vast; each season, I swear I discover a new remote corner of pavement. You’d think, then, that you as might as well just walk, but that means navigating hills and barely-there sidewalks outside of the stadium. The Dodger Stadium Express offers a partially useful alternative: The free bus leaves from Union Station and uses a dedicated lane to bypass all of the traffic on Sunset Boulevard. But at the end of the game, you’ll be stuck in a line of people to board and then a line of cars to leave. The only way around that? You’ll need to—sorry diehard Dodgers fans—leave by the eighth inning.