Category: planning

Looking forward to baseball by detailing the plans made to see it in the future.

More trip preparations

1. I used the L.A. Times web site to stop my subscription for the two weeks I’m going to be out of town. As Levi might have expected, I’m fully intending to buy a local paper every day of the trip, except perhaps when we’re at my aunt and uncle’s house (because I think they get the Philadelphia Inquirer) and when we’re at his parents’ house (because they get the Carmi Times).

2. I finally remembered to call the Hilton Pittsburgh to request a rollaway bed, so that Levi doesn’t have to sleep in the bathtub, or curled up in a dresser drawer. Up to this point, I had been a little worried about the ability of the AAA web site hotel booking interface to actually communicate successfully with the various hotels’ computer reservation systems, but the Hilton did have my reservation in their system, so I guess we’re all set. “See you August 28th,” said the woman on the phone. Maybe I should have requested a room facing PNC Park, too, but I’m not sure they even have such a thing. (I think this is the only hotel on the trip within possible sight distance of a ballpark…I think the Holiday Inn Express in Detroit is a little too far from Comerica Park, with too many tall buildings in between.)

Original comments…

Toby: That’s the first time in the history of the U.S. that The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Carmi Times have been mentioned in the same paragraph.

thatbob: Actually, Jim, there is an ordinance that allows you to burn down tall buildings in Detroit if they obstruct a view and haven’t been used for anything in 50 years, so, you know, bring some matches.

Levi: Knowing Jim, I expect him any time we travel together, to have exact change for any tolls.

I’ll be more impressed if he also has exact change for any newspaper honor boxes he needs to use along the way.

And Toby, if you can schedule the pull-out section of the Times about Baseball Related Program Activities for the Monday, August 23rd edition, that would be great.

Toby: OK, but I’m going to need you to proofread it. In my last section (on the local summer baseball and softball teams), I forgot to mention the names of two of the businesses that sponsor the 40-some-odd teams in their respective cutlines and got a call from one of the omitted businesses, during which I was reminded (in a threatening manner) how much advertising that business buys with our paper.

I’m sure the same thing’s happened a million times at The Philadelphia Inquirer, don’t you think?

Jim: What the Philadelphia Inquirer has is the CEO of Citizens Bank calling the CEO of Knight-Ridder every time they don’t use the full name of the Phillies’ ballpark, I’m sure. But then it takes a while to trickle down to the people who actually work at the newspaper.

Preparations continue at a fever pitch

With all the excitement over the songs earlier today, I forgot to post something else that’s related to the trip. Today, I bought a rain poncho. Sorry, Levi, it’s blue, not red, so if it rains at the Cardinals game, I will stick out like a sore thumb, or perhaps I should say a bruised thumb. But I’m all set for rain at the Expos game.

I also bought a new set of luggage. My former luggage was a high school graduation present, and if you remember luggage technology from 1992, this will sound familiar to you: the two big suitcases from the old set have tiny little wheels on the bottom, and I’ve never been able to adequately roll them along when loaded because they have a tendency to tip sideways, and the attached straps you’re supposed to lead them with are way too short. So I pretty much ignored the wheels after a while.

But thanks to the great strides in luggage technology over the last 12 years, the new set is of the type with the big wheels and the telescoping handle, and from trying them out on the way to the cash register at Target, and then through the parking lot to my car, they seem to be working great. However, we’ll see what happens after American Airlines gets their grubby hands, and their grubby conveyor belts, all over them.

My only regret is that if I was going to buy a new set of luggage, I should have bought it before my trip to New York last month, where I had to schlep my possessions through such scenic locales as the stretch of 8th Avenue in Manhattan between 50th Street and 48th Street, Grand Central Terminal, and the halls of the Marriott in Trumbull, Connecticut (okay, Grand Central actually is scenic, but it’s better when you don’t have to carry two pieces of baggage from the subway station to Lower Level Track 107 via the men’s room). There’s going to be much less walking with luggage on the baseball trip, I predict, unless the car breaks down and we decide to abandon it and walk to the next baseball game, rather than waiting for Hertz to send a mechanic out.

Anyway, the new set of luggage includes one bag that’s the perfect size to hold all the materials from AAA, it turns out, although it is still to be determined what exact configuration of luggage is going to accompany me on the trip. I realize I’d better leave some room for souvenirs, for one thing.

Original comments…

Levi: Jim, you mean those old suitcases weren’t specifically designed to tip over? I can’t imagine what else they were designed for, since they must have failed perfectly in every laboratory test.

I can hear music

First of all, Maura passes along this awesome link from ESPN.com’s Page 3, in which they list the at-bat songs for many MLB players. (Page 3? How many numbered pages does ESPN.com have now, anyway?)

And to fulfill a request by Cushie, here are the songs on the “baseball” playlist on my iPod, conveniently in one list. Levi and hangers-on, don’t click on the link if you want to be surprised in the car, although many of the songs have been named on this blog in the past, in several different entries that I don’t feel like going back and looking up.

Original comments…

Cushie: Awesome!

Luke, hanger-on: Here are some songs on the BRPA 2004 playlist I’ve been assembling since becoming a hanger-on (most of which you have already, and some of which have relationships to baseball and roadtrips that are tenuous at best):

Catfish, Bob Dylan
Two Bass Hit, Dizzy Gillespie
Bang the Drum Slowly, Emmylou Harris
Mrs. Robinson, Simon & Garfunkel
Pirate Jenny, Nina Simone
Yanqui Go Home, Camper Van Beethoven
I Could Drive Forever, Smog
On the Road Again, Bob Dylan
On the Road Again, Willie Nelson
This is Not a Song About a Train, Andrew Bird

Plus a CD’s worth of Bob Edwards-Red Barber chats and Barber highlights that I’ve been saving for the trip.

Jim, you have iPodRip, right?

Jim: I don’t have iPodRip or anything similar, mainly because I’ve never had a need to get music from my iPod onto my computer. Although if iPodRip can export playlists into HTML or XML, and it looks like it can, it probably would have come in handy when I was creating the song list!

thatbob: If you’re doing spoken word pieces, you really need to find the famous Lee Elia rant against Cub fans. And if you can find Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly singing “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg” then… then… then that’ll be awesome!

Dan: And if you need the Lee Elia rant, lemme know, I’ve got it in MP3.

Piked!

Maybe we should have picked the first or second itinerary options, because then we would have beat the Pennsylvania Turnpike toll increase that takes effect Sunday.

But at least we’re not going to be driving a vehicle weighing 100,001 pounds or more! I think our Pennsylvania Turnpike toll is going to be $16.25; the heaviest of trucks would pay $636.00 between the same two interchanges. Actually, based on my previous experiences, if that toll rate keeps a few trucks off the turnpike, it’s good, because driving between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh gets very tedious when you’re having to pass hundreds of trucks that are going very slowly up the hills.

Original comments…

Luke: Ah, fond memories of how Sandy and I decided to take the turnpike to get to Maryland. (Sorry the display is all munged up, and I can’t link to the precise post. It’s the fifth one.)

Jim: What was then a $6.50 toll (from the Ohio state line to Breezewood) is now $9.50.

I guess I can’t compare the I-79/I-68 routing to Three Rivers Stadium anymore, since I-79 and I-68 are still in existence. Perhaps someday they will be replaced by or supplemented with high-speed railroad corridors, which I will then be able to compare to PNC Park.

Speaking of your 2001 trip, have I ever mentioned that I bought a Nikon 990 digital camera based on the loveliness of the pictures from that trip (which, alas, seem to have disappeared from your site)? Sometimes I wish I’d bought something a little smaller, but I have to admit it takes lovely pictures. Of course, it’s way out of date now, much like my third-generation iPod that will also be making the trip. These kids today, with their 8-megapixel digital cameras and their click-wheel iPods…

Levi: If all goes well, I’ll next weekend (at my brother’s wedding) be getting my sister’s extra iPod (She got one, then her husband won one), passing mine along to Stacey, who has less need for thousands of songs at her fingertips daily.

I don’t know how big this one is, but it’s bigger than my 5-gig one, that’s for sure.

Jim: Won one by buying the 97,600,000th song (or whatever) from the iTunes Music Store? If so, awesome! If not, slightly less awesome, but still awesome! I can’t even remember now how many total songs I won from Pepsi bottlecaps. If it’s a third-generation iPod, it’ll work with the car charger I’m bringing, so there will be no need to worry about having to charge up the battery in order to listen to Jack Benny.

I hope the game justifies the positive feedback

I have been checking eBay occasionally to see if anyone is selling tickets for the games on the trip. Finally, that paid off, because I found someone selling his 18-rows-behind-the-plate season seats for the August 23rd Tigers-White Sox game. I gambled on not using “Buy It Now,” and that paid off as well; I ended up being the only bidder, so I got them for his starting price, a significant discount from the face value. The tickets came in the mail today.

I didn’t post anything about this before now because I didn’t want any of the miscreants who read this blog to bid on the tickets and bump the price up. These will probably be the best seats we have for any game on the trip, except perhaps Davenport, or Montreal.

Last chance

I’m going to order tickets for game 2 of our trip tomorrow, once I know whether my brother is joining us. That’s the game in St. Louis on August 22nd versus the Pirates.

So it’s your last chance, potential hangers-on. We’ve got a group of 9 so far (Me, Jim, Stacey, Luke, my parents, Tony, Geoff Goldman and his fiancee). Want to join us?

Original comments…

Luke: Is our group big enough to get a group rate and get welcomed on the DiamondVision? Maybe the nine of us can be waiting out on the field when the Cu^^Cardinals come out to start the game!

Luke: Oh, and I sure hope Matt Morris is pitching that day and does as well as he is doing today. Hee-hee!

Luke: Umm, nevermind. I expect that by the time of our trip I’ll be rooting for the Cards to keep the Pirates out of the wild-card race.

The trees are all gone

With one month to go until the trip officially starts with me flying to Chicago, I thought I’d show you all the items I got from AAA…

Not all of these items will make the trip, because their weight adds up. Most likely to be left at home are the Tourbooks for Arkansas/Kansas/Missouri/Oklahoma and Iowa/Minnesota/Nebraska/North Dakota/South Dakota, since in both cases, we’ll be in one of the included states for no more than a few hours.

Original comments…

Levi: I guess I’ll make the reservation for a trailer rental now.

If you thought 10 in 10 in 10 was a lot…

…make it 11 games in 11 cities in 10 days. Clearly having our trip in mind, the White Sox and Phillies have scheduled a makeup interleague game for Monday, August 30th, at 1:05 P.M. at Some Sort of Cellular-Type Company Field in Chicago. If the game doesn’t run too long past 3 hours, we should be able to see it, then drive to Milwaukee afterwards and see the 7:05 P.M. Brewers-Pirates game that’s been on the schedule all along.

I’ll update the itinerary later today. (Also, this would be a great day for Chicagolanders to take off work and become official hangers-on. We should have space for three of you in the car.)

Edited late Tuesday afternoon: As promised, the itinerary is updated.

Original comments…

Levi: I have to admit to proposing this addition to Jim with a bit of trepidation. I really do think that ending the trip with a two-city twinbill will answer, once and for all, whether I can possibly get tired of baseball.

There goes the smuggling operation

From the “Returning to the United States” portion of AAA’s “U.S.-Canada Border Information” handout: “Articles considered detrimental to the general welfare of the United States are prohibited entry. These include narcotics and dangerous drugs, drug paraphernalia, obscene articles and publications, seditious or treasonable matter, lottery tickets, hazardous articles (e.g. fireworks, dangerous toys, toxic or poisonous substances) and switchblade knives.”

Lottery tickets are detrimental to the general welfare of the United States? Have the various states been notified of this fact? Many of them seem to be depending on the sale of lottery tickets for a major portion of their budgets. (Hmm, maybe they specifically mean Canadian lottery tickets are detrimental to the general welfare of the United States.)

I guess this means we won’t be able to blow any remaining Canadian cash on lottery tickets near the border. Guess we’ll instead have to stock up on candy that’s not available in the U.S., including Nestle Smarties and Aero bars. (Because we’ll be in Canada less than 48 hours, we’ll be able to bring back up to $400 worth of candy, or anything other than lottery tickets. If we wind with anywhere near $400 worth of Canadian money with which to buy candy, it will either mean an ATM went crazy somewhere or we were surprisingly successful buskers.)

Original comments…

Levi: Jim, if you buy anything in Canadia, the terrorists win.

maura: you can buy aero bars at the deli around the corner from my apartment.

Jim: Along with poutine, Kraft Dinner, caffeine-free Mountain Dew, and Anne Murray CDs?

(Yes, yes, I know Kraft Dinner is readily available in the U.S. under the name Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, or, if you prefer, Cheese and Macaroni. Leave it to the Canadians to just assume that dinner will involve macaroni and cheese.)

Levi: Also, $400 Canadian is equal to about $.28-$.35 American, depending on the prevailing exchange rates. We just might end up with that much money.

Jason: Don’t forget to pick up some ketchup-flavored potato chips.

On second thought, I think you’ve tried them before, so, forget it, after all.

There are no longer any tentative items on the itinerary

The Triptik arrived from AAA. Actually, it’s a 3-volume Triptik because of how many pages they had to try to stuff into it, including a full-page explanation of how much the toll is on the Tappan Zee Bridge, even though we’re traveling in the toll-free direction.

I’ve changed the driving times on the itinerary to reflect what the Triptik claims, and added the distances. The total distance, which I didn’t list on the itinerary, is calculated by them to be 3259 miles. Some say that’s a long way to go for a few baseball games. Others say it’s not long enough. (Should be interesting to see what the actual mileage ends up being.)

I have also made reservations for the final two hotels. In Detroit, we will be staying at the Holiday Inn Express downtown, which is half a mile from Comerica Park (and I’m told that downtown Detroit is reasonably safe to walk through at night).

In beautiful Galesburg, Illinois, the four of us will be staying at the Country Inn & Suites by Carlson, which I guess is named for Gordon Jump’s character Arthur Carlson on “WKRP in Cincinnati.” A suite wasn’t too much more expensive than a room, so I got one of those, which is supposed to have three beds and should keep people from tripping over each other. I assume Levi and Stacey don’t have a problem sharing a bed.

This is all reflected on the itinerary, of course.

Original comments…

Levi: For some reason, Thursday the 26th is missing from the itinerary. That means no Boston.

I know Jim’s incapable of making a mistake, so I assume this is the fault of the Internet.

Jim: Are you familiar with “Brigadoon”? Boston’s like that, except that instead of regularly disappearing for 1,000 years, it occasionally disappears for a few hours. Thats’s why it’s taking so long for them to finish the Big Dig.

Jason: Hopefully today’s earthquake hasn’t destroyed any of Galesburg’s accommodations.

Dr. Otto Octavius: If the earthquake hasn’t, then I certainly will!