Baseball Road Trip

Patrick, Einar and I took a road trip across the midwest to see different baseball stadiums.  Meghan stayed home.  We saw 7 stadiums in 7 days.  It was a great trip.  

Here we are in Chicago.  We flew into Chicago because Einar was staying there over the summer.  In this picture we are about to eat delicious barbecue on the shores of lake michigan (i think it's that lake).  The ribs here were really good.

Our first night we went to Wrigley Field and saw Cubs v. Red Sox.  The Red Sox won.  Wrigley was pretty cool on the outside.  It felt really historic.

But as you can see, the inside was not quite as nice.  It was cool because it was old, but not the greatest place in the world to watch a baseball game (bad sightlines, brown grass, etc).

We stayed at Einar's wife's parents' house while we were in Chicago.  After our first night there we drove up to Milwaukee to see Miller Park.  People were tailgating in the parking lot.  I've never seen that at a baseball game before.  Everyone was eating Johnsonville Brats and drinking Miller Light.  The atmosphere was really great and everyone was nice, but we couldn't spot a single attractive woman over the age of 30.  They are good looking up until that point but not after.

Einar and Pat at Miller Park:

After the Brewers game we drove back down to Chicago.  We stayed with Sarah's parents again.  Oh, by the way, it was 95+ degrees the whole time.  Go figure we'd end up driving through the midwest in the middle of a heatwave.

Next we drove the long drive to Detroit.  Comerica Park was probably the second-nicest stadium we saw.  It was really nice.  Detroit was pretty deserted, and things were cheap there.  Overall it seemed like a pretty good vibe though.  Lots of abandoned buildings and NO traffic (because they have way more infrastructure than they need at this point.  Here is Comerica:

After the game this sign was seen.  Classy.

Next we drove to Cleveland.  We played soccer and tennis at Cleveland State University and did some running.  It was really hot.  Then we went to Progressive (formerly Jacobs) field.  Man it was hot that day.  Cleveland had a lot of deserted buildings too.

The next day we drove to Pittsburgh to see PNC Park.  It was easily the nicest stadium we saw.  Part of that is that Pittsburgh seems like a really cool/vibrant city.  But the stadium is just gorgeous.  Not that different than most of the midwest stadiums, which tended to all be very similar, but just nicer.  Right on the river, great view of the skyline, etc. Check out this video:

Here's the Pittsburgh skyline.

And the river.

More PNC.

Here is Pat sleeping under a table after we watched the Miami Heat win the NBA Championship (after the Pirates game).  We stayed at a hotel near the airport.  We were able to find a lot of cheap/nice hotels using Hotwire.   Oh, I should also mention at some point that all this driving took place during a heat wave in a car with no air conditioning.  It was really hot.

The next day we drove to Philly, where we were supposed to watch Cliff Lee pitch.  But the game got rained out.  Check out this video of the thunder and lightning!

Here is the big tarp they put on the field.  I've never seen a rain delay before since we have a retractable roof in Seattle, and before that we had the kingdome.

We hung around for about two hours before we finally left.  They still hadn't cancelled the game at that point, but they eventually did.  Oh well.  We got to see the stadium anyhow.

After Philly we stayed the night in New Jersey, then drove to NYC the next day.  After a brief SNAFU at the Holland Tunnel, we made it downtown to watch soccer.  Oh, I should mention we were watching a lot of soccer throughout the trip because Euro Championships were on.  We watched a ton of soccer games.  So we were watching NBA finals, Euro Championships, and a baseball game every day.  Lots of sports.  Anyway, here is Einar in Washington Square.  

We met up with Pat's sister in New York, then went to the Mets v. Yankees game.  Citi field is okay, but not the nicest we'd seen.  It is similar to the old Shea stadium but newer.  We couldn't see the whole outfield from our seats.

After NYC I caught a bolt bus up to Mass. to visit Meghan's family.   Overall, we had an amazing trip. We may try to do another baseball trip some day because it was really very fun.