LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan Our route over the last two weeks gave me whiplash. First, we made our way south from Kentucky into Arkansas and Texas. Then we turned right around and headed back into Arkansas, and from there on to Missouri, Illinois, and finally Indiana.
Our route looks odd on a map, but we chose it largely because of sports. We wanted to hit the Major League Baseball stadiums in Dallas, Houston, and St. Louis while their teams were in town, and after that, we had to get to Indianapolis in time for the biggest race of the year. I’d like to tell you that’s all we were doing over the last two weeks: watching baseball and cheering on the vroom-vrooms at the Indy 500. But I can’t. More than anything else, we were tracking the weather.
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LONG STORY SHORT By Jason Clark Nearly 11 months into the Big Trip, we’ve had fairly good luck with weather. We’ve hiked in 100-degree heat, kayaked in a downpour, and dealt with one rain delay among the 12 baseball games we’ve seen. For 11 months, none of our plans had been ruined or canceled due to bad weather.
But on Memorial Day weekend, our luck was about to run out. LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan I love baseball—kind of. Truthfully, I love the idea of baseball more than the sport itself. It gives me the same warm, fuzzy feeling I get when I think of Christmas at my parents’ house or watching movies on Saturday mornings with my mom. (A League of Their Own is one of her favorites.) That’s because, with two diehard Los Angeles Angels fans for parents, I grew up surrounded by the sport.*
That said, when Jason told me he wanted to see a game at most of the Major League Baseball stadiums during our Big Trip, I can’t say I was thrilled. LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan A couple weeks ago, I didn’t expect to have much material for this newsletter.
That’s because, of our six upcoming stops, four would be big cities that we’d visit just long enough to see a game at the local Major League Baseball stadium. As for the other two stops, they included one Ohio state park and Kentucky’s only national park—both of which sounded great, but not oh-wow-I-can’t-wait-to-put-this-in-the-newsletter great. Basically, I expected this newsletter to say one thing: We went to lots of baseball games. I had no idea how wrong I would be. Yes, we went to lots of baseball games over the past couple weeks--five, to be precise--but we also got four surprises. One of those surprises was downright awful. Two were pretty spectacular. And one became a memory we’ll treasure for the rest of our lives. Here’s a look at the utterly not-dull time we’ve been having lately. LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan On our second night in a campground outside Pittsburgh, I woke to a blaring noise right beside my head.
It was my phone. It was 1:00 a.m., and Jason’s phone was emitting the same buzzing drone. Already awake, he stared at its screen. I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and saw this: LONG STORY SHORT By Jason Clark While the Big Trip is mostly about visiting national parks, it’s also about checking off another bucket-list item of mine: attending a game at every ballpark in Major League Baseball. At this time last year, I had been to five ballparks. Now, after nearly a year on the road, I’ve visited 14 ballparks, nearly half of the 30 in MLB.
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