Thursday, July 19, 2007

Four Summer Days In Four American Cities: Nothing But Baseball, Hot Dogs, and Highway Driving With My Two Sons – Post #7: Touching Home Plate


After the Sunday afternoon Cubs-Pirates game, Gregg, Doug and I enjoyed some great conversation and a nice Tex-Mex Dinner at Don Pedro’s, out toward the Pittsburgh airport.

We then dropped Gregg off at his steel city airdrome hotel from where he would fly home very early Monday morning. The car seemed to naturally point its way northward toward the Cleveland area where Doug and I would spend the last night of our baseball odyssey before driving to Chicago to fly home.

On Monday morning we drove past “The Jake” (Jacobs Field) in downtown Cleveland (above) on the shores of Lake Erie. This is where the Indians play their home games. Due to the MLB All-star Game break, the field was eerily empty and silent.

Down the road apiece, along the same lake shore, is the Cleveland Browns football stadium – adjacent to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. One last baseball city and two neat stadiums provided a perfect tip of the hat to our trip.

O, yes, I did get my luggage back. It was delivered to the house about 36 hours after we arrived back in Seattle. Fierce thunder storms in the Midwest had delayed hundreds of flights at O’Hare on the evening of the 9th, resulting in Doug and I getting re-routed home through San Jose where we transferred to a different airline.

That, apparently, was too much for the airline luggage people to keep up with.

We flew some 4,000 total miles and drove an additional 2,000 miles going from city to city on our great American baseball adventure. We saw four and a half baseball games, including extra innings, and visited five of the newer Major League baseball parks (if you include the Cleveland drive by).

For me, it was the trip of a lifetime, enjoying the greatest game of all – baseball – in four of the very best new parks in America. And best of all, it was with my sons, taking pleasure in our common passion.

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