2012 Ultimate Baseball “Fantasy” Adventure – A look back part 2

This portion of our look back covers the first 7 days of the trip, going from Seattle to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Detroit. The weather in Seattle wasn’t great, otherwise typical for Seattle, for the first day of our journey. Like I noted in the blog driving to Safeco Field isn’t something I do much. It was an unusual 4:15 PT start and before we headed to the stadium it was a quick trip to Puyallup to pick Mom up for her first game in years. She doesn’t miss many games on the TV, but going to the game in person was a lot of fun for her. After the game and dinner at the Metropolitan Grill it was back to Puyallup to drop Mom off and head back to I-5 to head down to San Francisco. I took the initial shift behind the wheel (and control of the radio) as we headed out of Washington and into Oregon. With the amount of driving in this trip to get the first shift out of the way was good. Traffic at that time of the day was no problem and we did a good job of hitting the speed limit (and a little bit more) until we got to Eugene where we filled up for the first time and Pat took over. He took the balance of the overnight drive and was still driving when the sun came up, and we entered California where we had to gas up again and Steven got behind the wheel to finish the trip to San Francisco. We were all running on adrenalin and didn’t want to sleep so we pretty much had a good visit all the way there. Shawn and Steven dozed a bit early on and I grabbed a couple hours while Pat was driving and Pat napped as we headed toward the bay area. Not much sleep but with the excitement not much sleep was needed. We got a hold of Corey in San Francisco and set up where we would meet at AT&T Park before Sunday’s game. Corey is a heck of a guy and we had a great time with good seats that we picked up from scalpers before the game. We won’t be able to or need to do that often but Sunday was one time we did. After the game we went to our hotel for the night and decided to get a good night rest before heading to Los Angeles on Monday morning. Once we got up we headed for Los Angeles with Pat behind the wheel. It was a good drive there and we tried to do our best to avoid rush hour traffic. I was the navigator on this leg of the trip, but it wasn’t that hard. Like Pat said in his “Pat’s Thoughts” post it might have made more sense to go to Staples Center to watch the LA Kings wrap up the Stanley Cup over New Jersey, but this trip was about baseball, not hockey. For a low scoring game it was like the game wouldn’t end which threatened to put our trip behind the 8-ball as we were heading to Denver after the game with an all night drive staring us right in the face. We finally got out of Los Angeles with Steven driving to Las Vegas where we got some food and some gas and turned our trip into Shawn’s hands. I was up for his shift while Pat and Steven slept. Shawn drove us out of Nevada thru the northwest portion of Arizona and into Utah before I took my shift behind the wheel. Shawn stayed up with me and we had some good father/son time in the middle of the night into the early morning hours. We made some pretty good time until we made it to I-80 when it was time to gas up again and change to the final driver of this leg of the trip Pat. Shawn and I napped for a while on this portion of the trip. The weather was hot and we were very concerned about the wildfires that had just recently broken out both in New Mexico and north of Denver area in Colorado. Those fires got much worse after we got thru the area but you could tell it might get bad. We made it to Coors Field, which I thought was pretty cool with the plan to stay the night in Denver. We needed to get some good sleep, even if it wasn’t the longest sleep time. While in Denver I tried to talk Shawn into eating one of Colorado’s delicacies, Rocky Mountain Oysters, but after he did a Google search, he decided that wasn’t a good idea. We got off to an early start on Wednesday as we headed to Kansas City. Pat and I shared the drive right down the middle with me driving to Hayes Kansas and Pat driving the rest of the way to Kansas City. We had a good time at the home of the 2012 MLB All-Star Game, Kaufman Stadium. We had a busy day ahead with a diversion in our route so I drove us to Des Moines Iowa after the game for a long nap until we left on Thursday morning. Once we got up in the morning I got back behind the wheel and drove us to Dyersville Iowa to where the movie Field of Dreams was filmed. That was really cool and Shawn and I, along with Pat and Steven had a little catch and went thru all that there was to see there. When we left we had one of those rare trips that was mostly devoid of interstate highways on the way to Minneapolis to make a stop at Target Field. We made a couple of quick diversions before we made it to Target Field, seeing the Mall of America, along with the statue of Mary Tyler Moore who made her TV home in the Twin Cities. There was a bit of threat of weather in Minneapolis, but we avoided it and had the chance to see Philadelphia for the first of what would be 3 times in the trip. With another all-night drive to face we left the stadium right after the game. We were going to go thru Chicago 3 times in this trip and decided against a 4th time so we took the “scenic” route via the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for the trip to Detroit. We filled up our bellies and the gas tank, as we would be on the road for about 7 hours before it would get light again. Steven took the first shift and drove out of Minnesota and into northern Wisconsin where we gassed up and changed drivers. Pat was the co-pilot for Steven on the first leg and vice/versa on the 2nd leg with Pat doing the driving. Shawn and I snoozed as well as we could. When morning had broken we were well into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan very close to the north end of Lake Michigan. We would see the southern portion of the lake in a few short days. We got onto I-75 for the first of many times in this trip and crossed the toll bridge into the lower portion of Michigan. We gassed up again and Shawn took his 2nd shift of the trip driving us to Saginaw before he let me take over for the balance of the trip into Detroit. We did get there in time to check into our hotel for the night and since we were very close to Comerica Park we were able to walk to the game, which frankly was a lot of fun. We headed out right after the game to get as much sleep as possible before we made the trip to Toronto that will be recapped along with the next week in the next post. Enjoy!