This begins a review of our adventure over the next few days. I will have the chance to look at the trip again with the benefit of knowing how the trip went from beginning to end. There are some highlights that didn’t make the original blog postings that I will try to get into here. I’ll try to break these up, a few days at a time. I will also be reviewing the games we saw during the trip and bring up some interesting notes from them as well in separate postings. There were also some questions that came up during the trip that we really didn’t have the time to get to that I will go thru in a posting of its own. The genesis of this trip goes back into early May when for fun I tried to put together an itinerary that would allow us to do a trip like this if we could make it work. I’ve tried in the past to do these, as has Pat as he noted in one of his early “Pat’s Thoughts” postings. Putting a trip itinerary like this together is like trying to do a maze. You could be going as smooth as the Titanic before it hit the iceberg and then literally get blown out of the water because you have no place to go for the next game. So I sat down with access to an MLB schedule at my fingers with the only prerequisite that the trip start near my hometown of Federal Way Washington. I would have preferred the trip end in Seattle as well, but with the way the trip fell into place the all-star game came at the end of the trip, but I did end in the MLB city closest to Seattle. It took me 2 shots to hit upon a workable schedule, or about 90 minutes. I was able to tweak it a bit to make some of the trips a bit shorter (and which also caused me a problem with the rainout in Philadelphia. I originally had us in Pittsburgh (from Boston) on the fateful Friday, then Philadelphia on Saturday, but thought going to Philadelphia first then Pittsburgh on Saturday made more sense based on where we were on Thursday and Sunday). That tweaking bit me in the butt. Having a good feel for the schedule helped when we had the rainout in Philadelphia and gave us the opportunity to shift the schedule a little bit to make everything fit in. It was between weather and long extra inning games before a long trip that had us most concerned during the trip. Once I hit on the schedule I thought about how cool it would be to
actually do a trip like this. Being someone in my mid 50’s (or so) I should be beyond having a midlife crisis, but I guess not. I talked with my older brother in Austin and talked about what I had come up with and how I thought it would be cool to actually do the trip and he thought so too. Brothers can definitely think alike. We decided we needed a couple of more to help with the driving and so forth. Pat invited his son Steven to join us. I think he was kind of bored with the trip, but he is between jobs, so he decided why not join us. My son Shawn was our 4th. Shawn was just wrapping up his junior year of high school with another year of straight A’s and with him being the same type of sports fan like I am, he was ready to go (although his mom, my wife, was not in favor of it). Shawn showed his sports knowledge with the quality of his posts recapping the games we were seeing. Pat and I had both had good success with our investments over the year and we figured this trip would cost about 20 grand to pull off, so we put our heads and our cash together and said what the heck, let’s do it!! Pat works for the State of Texas and has plenty of vacation/leave time so he could go. I have a regular job, but my boss said he could save a little on his bottom line by not having to pay me for a month and had my work covered so he was behind it. The 2 younger ones didn’t have those types of responsibilities so the plan was put into place. The trip would start on June 9 in Seattle and even though we had our tentative itinerary
there was still a lot that had to be done before we left. We made the decision to rent a Dodge Caravan as the official vehicle of this trip. It was appropriate as this was basically our caravan that we were doing. We wanted a vehicle that had plenty of room so those that needed to be sleeping on the road could be. We knew there was going to be many long days so we ended up not having specific drivers at specific times, but Pat and I were the main drivers with Steven pulling some good shifts and Shawn taking the odd shift as needed. We had 2 main laptops with us, and a 3rd to use as a backup if needed, but it wasn’t needed. Besides using them to do these posts we also kept track of things as we went from city to city. We knew that we would be pounding down a lot of fast food and ballpark food, so I knew it would be a tough trip to control my weight. We were looking at certain ballparks to eat specific foods, but the rest of the trip we would eat whatever we could wherever. A lot of times we combined food with gas refills to cut the amount of time off of the road particularly when we had big miles to cover. In the next post I will review the first 7 days from Seattle thru Detroit. I hope you will enjoy reading these posts.
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