Pat's preview

Hi everyone. This is Mike’s older brother Pat and I wanted to add a few thoughts to what Mike has already written.

The first obvious question is “who in their right mind would ever think of doing this?” I came up with the original idea (no comment about being in my right mind…) back in the mid 80’s. Just for grins, I thought it would be a fun paper exercise to figure out how to drive to all 26 major league ballparks in the course of a month. Not easy to do, considering the 55 mile per hour speed limit nationwide at the time, but also we had 4 days off instead of 1 day off this trip. And the biggest difference is that are now 30 major league ballparks, so it makes it a bit more difficult.

But here we are, ready to embark on the big "fantasy" trip. We should mesh quite well, as the tough part will be driving. I’m the big morning person of the group, while Mike and my son Steve are a bit more the night owls. So the long drives – and there are several of them – should match up fine. Mike will be the main blog poster during the trip, and I will add some perspective as we go along.

For those who are related to us, you might recall the famous road trip that the Smith girls made in the summer of 1983 to get Janet from college. Our wonderful Aunt Jo kept the diary of the trip, and she kept it in rhyme, which was awesome beyond words. We aren’t as clever and creative as she is (I don’t think very many people are), but we will try to keep things updated as much as possible. I have my reliable Toshiba laptop, so we should be able to blog fairly well during the trip. We hope you enjoy following along on our "fantasy" trip.