The Brothers in Baseball

BIB2014: Toledo, Midland (MI), and Detroit

Since both Kevin and Mark had driven to Dayton, they were able to arrive a few minutes in advance of the 11:48am arrival time of Gerry and Scott’s flight.  Kevin had driven his own car and Mark had dropped off a rental car that he had just driven in from a trip to visit his daughter in Chicago.  With Scott being the consummate trip planner, you’d think he would plan better himself than to check a bag for a BIB trip. Nevertheless, that’s what he did, leaving Mark and Kevin just enough extra time in the cellphone lot to knock out the audiobook of Homer’s Odyssey and translate it from the original Greek.

Just inches from having this transgression cause him to be stripped of his trip planning responsibilities, Scott made a last second kick-save by suggesting lunch at Slyders in Dayton. The place had the perfect mix of clientele: 50 percent senior citizens who can’t remember ever having been young and 50 percent bikers who look like they’d eat their young.  Slyders was an oasis of cheeseburgers and fried walleye in a desert of road construction and suburban blight.  When Andy Travis (of WKRP fame) warned Les Nessman, “Be Careful! Dayton can be dangerous after dark", he must have been thinking about this neighborhood.  Once we made it past the Hell’s Angels perched like gargoyles on the outside porch, the two waitresses who alternated paying visits to our table were a one-two punch that complemented each other wonderfully.  One was perky, young and attractive and the other was, well, like us.

If you read the reviews of Dayton’s National Museum of the United States Air Force on Yelp, they will tell you that you should plan to spend an entire 8-hour day, or for a quick visit, plan on at least 4 hours.  We tried to see it in 90 minutes.  Our breathless dash through roughly a third of the exhibits seemed more like negotiating a Parcours Trail than touring one of the world’s largest collections of aircraft and missiles.  Still, how many chances do you get to simultaneously learn a ton about the history of aviation and reach your target heart rate for the day.

Late Friday afternoon, we drove from Dayton to Toledo to see the Mudhens take on the Louisville Bats.  Kevin had secured us tickets that allegedly would get us into the one of the suites. Unfortunately, they didn’t even get us into the stadium.  When the ticket taker scanned them, they registered as duplicate tickets that had already been used.  This sent Kevin into a series of negotiations that would have made Henry Kissinger proud with every ticket window attendant he could find.  He eventually emerged with tickets that got us into the stadium and, eventually, the spacious and roomy suite – spacious and roomy, that is, if it hadn’t been double-booked.  As it was, we were packed in tightly enough that within a few minutes, we could close our eyes and readily identify strangers by body type and personal hygiene habits. The folks in the half-filled suites nearby had to get a chuckle watching us emerge into the outside seating area like circus clowns from a Volkswagen.  We eventually gave up on the whole corporate box thing and wandered the stadium like baseball nomads.  Fifth Third Field, where the Mudhens play, has a set of seats perched above right field known as “The Roost”.  They have been cited by several sources as the best seats in all of minor league baseball.  We wouldn’t know, but they looked nice from a distance.  The Mudhens did manage to win, however, 6-0 in a 3-hit shutout.

Following the game, we made the short drive to our overnight accommodations in Detroit.  The last night of our trip in 2013, we spent the night at an airport hotel that was under so much construction that we had to use a side entrance to get in and then weave our way through the hallways and up some stairs to get back to the front desk.  Our first night of this year’s trip was quite an improvement.  This time we stayed at an airport hotel that was under so much construction that we had to use a side entrance to get in, but this time, they’d set up a makeshift registration desk near the side entrance for our convenience.  Not only that, but we managed to be there the weekend that they were hosting the Global Benchwar Benchpress Championships.  Nothing says elegance and Midwestern hospitality quite like an airport Marriott with hordes of steroid-crazed Hans and Franz wannabees roaming the unpainted drywall hallways.

After breakfast Saturday morning at the nearby Bob Evans (always a BIB must for breakfast when we’re in the Midwest), we headed to the Henry Ford Museum and Rouge Factory Tour.  The National Park Service web site says that “The Ford River Rouge Complex may be the world's most famous auto plant”.  Maybe so, but none of us had ever heard of it.  As far as we knew, a Rouge plant was what make-up grows on.  Turns out, it comes by its name because of its location on the Rouge River.  Who knew?  We allotted 2-1/2 hours for a tour of the Rouge factory and the Henry Ford Museum.  We obviously did not account for the fact that the Rouge tour alone consumes 2-1/2 hours, including the bus ride to said Rouge River site.  This left us with our second museum 10K in two days.  Normally we would never consider a museum cafeteria for one of our meals, but the in this case, with time running short, we considered the Michigan Cafe for lunch.  What finally clinched it was when we got a look at the menu and discovered [insert Homer Simpson Voice here] “mmmmmm…carrot cake”.

After going all Joey Chestnut on the carrot cake and whatever else we could speed-eat at the cafeteria, we hopped in the car and bolted for Hitsville, USA, Motown’s first headquarters in Detroit, and now home to the Motown Historical Museum.  We knew we needed to leave Detroit by 4:30pm in order to get to the 7:00pm game that night in Midland.  The first clue that our schedule might be in some jeopardy (again) was that there was a surprisingly long line outside the place.  Hitsville is essentially just an old house that was converted into a recording studio.  Ironically, while that particular house had a line nearly out to the street, many of the nicer houses around it had been abandoned; the not-nicer ones had been condemned. It appeared that every human being within a 4-block radius was on the front lawn of Hitsville (except, of course, for the youths we were pretty sure were back at Kevin’s car, removing the hubcaps).  We waited in line long enough to spot a tour guide who was a dead-ringer for Diana Ross and for Gerry to recognize a woman on the front lawn that he was sure was someone else really famous.  Mark suggested it might be Kesha…and it might have been, but for the fact that the woman on the lawn was African American and Kesha is most certainly not.  We arrived at the front of the line at 2:30pm, just in time to find out that the next tour didn’t leave until 4:20…and the guided tours took 40 minutes (which completely sucked, because we knew that with 2 days of museum wind-sprint experience under out belts, we could have toured the place ourselves in 10 minutes at most).  As we headed back to Kevin’s car, now with some time on our hands since we’d given up on the Motown tour, we discovered a black bag full of something had been placed next to the car while we were away.  We tried to ignore it, but the thing was large enough that even a few passersby yelled to us, asking if we’d accidentally set it down and forgotten it.  We hopped in the car quickly and took off, hoping that it wasn’t a pipe bomb.  Turns out that we were merely abandoning one potentially life-threatening situation for another, as Kevin and Scott decided to go on a little self-misguided movie site tour of Detroit.  We started by heading for Mumford High School, famous for the t-shirts worn by Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hill Cop.  Recall that this is the same movie in which the antagonist, Victor Maitland, is compelled to conclude that “Detroit is a very violent city, isn’t it?”  So at least by the Nessman/Maitland index, this was officially the most ill-advised selection of cities ever for a BIB trip.  Turns out, much to our disappointment, that Mumford High School underwent a $54 million renovation in 2012 and is no longer the godforsaken bullet-ridden hellhole of a concrete jungle we’d been hoping for.  No worries – we headed for 8 Mile Road.  Surely, the namesake of a movie that introduced more “F” words in two hours than Sesame Street did in four decades would not disappoint.  We cranked up the movie’s theme song “Lose Yourself” (explicit lyrics and all) as we approached what we expected to look like London after the Blitz.  Scott could barely contain his enthusiasm (“I feel so alive!”) for roaming some of the same bastions of gang violence that Eminem and Mekhi Phifer had only a dozen years ago.  Imagine our collective disappointment when we found that the intervening years had replaced run-down trailer parks and drug-infested tenement houses with an endless stretch of strip malls and reasonably well manicured lawns.

Still with time to blow, and disappointed that we hadn’t seen so much as a fourth-degree felony being committed in Detroit, we broke with tradition and drove directly to our hotel in Midland Michigan, actually checking in before the game (normally, we stumble in bleary-eyed after the game, mutter enough words to the reservation desk attendant to convince them we deserve a room key, and drag ourselves to our rooms).  A precious few rooms on the second floor overlooked the entrance foyer, where an already well-lubricated wedding party (emphasis on the “party”) was gearing up for an all-night bender.  Scott was lucky enough to land one of those rooms.  If they were going to party up a storm, Scott was going to be positioned precisely at the eye wall.  As we drove to the game in Midland, we were impressed that several contiguous miles of the main boulevard through town were lined a few feet deep on both sides with marigolds.  We later learned that it takes about six-hundred volunteers a Saturday morning to plant the marigolds each year.  Once we arrived at Dow Diamond, the home of the Great Lakes Lunes, we came to understand just what it was for which the marigolds were compensating.  Beyond the right field foul pole, rising into view much as the Roberto Clemente Bridge does beyond center field in Pittsburgh or the Gateway Arch does in St. Louis, was the Dow Chemical power plant that fairly dominates the landscape.  Trying to dress up the approach to the power plant with a couple miles of marigolds seems a little like putting whipped cream on manure.  The game itself, however, was pretty entertaining.  There was a collision on a pop fly when no one called the ball - in this case, between Scott and Kevin in the stands.  Scott came down with the ball.  Scott and Mark gave the ball to a young boy sitting nearby.  Over the course of the evening, however, there was a crescendo of remorse for that decision.  It started with Mark matter-of-factly noting that “he didn’t say thanks” and grew to include phrases like “little ingrate punk”.  The Great Lakes mascot, Lou E. Loon, spent some quality time sitting between Mark and Scott.  Dude’s whole personality was just enough of a bubble off plumb that you had to wonder about the cumulative effect of a few seasons of inhaling chemical plant fumes.  The Great Lakes Loons won 4-2, as the Kane County Cougars left the bases loaded to end the game.

The last day of BIB 2014 was kicked off at Stackers Grill, an unassuming little breakfast spot in a Midland strip mall.  The largely senior citizen – and entirely local – clientele seemed only mildly concerned that we showed up and immediately started snapping photos outside the place.  You could have forgiven them if someone had placed a call to the regional office of homeland security.  From Midland, we headed to Ann Arbor, to check out the “Big House”, a.k.a. Michigan Stadium. Our first stop in Ann Arbor was at the college-student-hip downtown Starbucks.  Our selection of locale may have given off an AARP-eligible chic vibe a la George Clooney, but the fact that most of us headed straight for the restroom to relieve our bladders was a little more Abe Vigoda.

After snapping a few pictures at and around the stadium, we headed back toward Detroit and Comerica Park.  The Sunday game was a sellout.  Somehow, Scott had landed us marvelous seats at the end of a short aisle down the left field line.  Being on the end of an aisle was convenient, since the stifling afternoon heat had us spending much of the game getting up and down, moving about in search of a cool breeze.  The relatively narrow concourses at Comerica and the fact that the seats are not “angled into play” down the foul lines served as reminders that Comerica is now almost a decade and a half old, as many of the newer barks have perfected these attributes for fan comfort and proximity to the action on the field.  Still, Comerica offers an awful lot to love between its views of the downtown skyline, stylish architecture of the ballpark itself, and things to see around the stadium.  A Tigers victory even completed the first BIB weekend sweep since 2000 when the Padres, Dodgers, and Rancho Cucamonga Quakes pulled off the hat trick.  Following the game, all that remained for the trip to the airport was to ponder what shenanigans we can conjure up for 2015 and the 25^th anniversary of our first BIB game in 1990.

BIB2013: The Elvis has Left the Building, and is Charging You Plenty to Go There! Tour

Scott plans.  Mark drives.  Kevin navigates.  Gerry photographs.  So when Gerry was granted driving duties, just because he was the first one to arrive in Memphis, we should have realized we were messing with the sacred order of things.  That’s precisely the kind of foolish stunt that got those Nazi guys’ faces melted in Raiders of the Lost Ark.  It’s a tidy little system we normally have – one that works primarily because we’ve spent years isolating the single skill that each of us possesses.  After riding with Gerry in the pilot’s seat for three days, we can confidently confirm that we’d properly identified his lone skill as photography. 

Speaking of the sacred order of things, Scott hadn’t been on the ground in Memphis ten minutes when he started spouting some sort of gibberish that, if we didn’t know better, sounded like “isn’t it time we invited significant others on a baseball trip?”  We’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that we simply misheard him saying something like “it’s time for a magnificent Brothers in Baseball trip”.

Screwing with our standard responsibilities sent the whole BIB world spinning off its axis.  So with Gerry driving, guess who we selected to navigate?  Everyone.  Since Gerry brought his Garmin and everyone else had a navigational app of some sort loaded on his smartphone, we turned them all on at once, figuring the more advice we got, the better off we’d be.  If directions were conflicting (and they often were), majority ruled.  Turns out that letting all the devices scream at Gerry at once merely turns them into weapons of mass distraction.  There quickly developed a rivalry of sorts between Gerry’s Garmin and Mark’s Waze app.  Mark’s app lost its Waze and tried to send us to some ballpark other than Pringles Park, home of the Jackson (Tennessee) Generals.  The resultant death-defying U-turn on a four-lane highway made the score Garmin 1, Waze 0.  In fairness to the Waze app, there is some question as to whether Mark had properly entered our destination, once again reinforcing the “one man, one skill” BIB theorem.  In fairness to Mark, we should point out that he was slightly more competent with a GPS than our usual navigator, Kevin, in that Mark at least knew how to turn the damn thing on.

It was both “Christmas in July” night and “Garden Gnome Giveaway” night at Pringles Park – an embarrassment of quirky riches that gave the park the feel of a holiday ad for Travelocity. Aside from that, the ballpark itself was fairly nondescript.  The game was another story, as the hometown Generals won on a two-out, tenth-inning walk-off single, defeating the Mississippi Braves.  On the way to the Doubletree after the game, the Garmin inexplicably turned us onto an access road on the opposite side of the highway from our hotel, unnecessarily trimming precious minutes off of our sleep time.  The score was now Garmin 1 Waze 1.

After a good night’s sleep, Day 2 offered a fresh start.  We piled into the SUV, silenced our smartphones and let Scott assume the duties of co-pilot, assisted only by Gerry’s Garmin.  Never mind that the sum total of his navigational advice to Gerry was “over here, I think”; still, there was an air of confidence emanating from the front seat that said “Today is a new day!  We will not maim ourselves going the wrong way on a divided highway!  We will not wander aimlessly in regions of the Deep South rich with the sound of banjo music!”  With this self-assured tone, Gerry reached to begin our day’s journey by releasing the parking brake…and the hood popped up.  Still, we were able to get through breakfast and make it all the way to Mississippi by 10:00am.  That would have been a fabulous outcome…if we had intended to go to Mississippi.  We were actually trying to get to Shiloh, Tennessee.  Look at a map.  Draw a line from Jackson, Tennessee to Shiloh, Tennessee and then try to imagine how four grown men – all with college degrees, courtesy of our country’s educational system – somehow wind up in Mississippi.  To quote Agent K, in Men in Black, “Kind of makes you feel proud, doesn't it?”  Waze 2, Garmin 1.

The day’s original itinerary (“itinerary” in the sense that Gilligan’s itinerary was a three-hour tour) had been to visit the Shiloh Civil War Battlefield, swing by the Jack Daniel’s Distillery in Lynchburg, and then make our way in a leisurely fashion to Birmingham for a ballgame.  Now we had to call for an audible that included an abbreviated stop in Shiloh, followed by a hell-bent-for-leather-Cannonball-Run-scramble to make it to Huntsville, Alabama’s Space Center instead.  So imagine how it messed with our collective psyche when we were stopped on a two-lane country highway in the middle of nowhere by the following: an overhead forklift on the right side of the road (but hanging into our path) moving pallets between a stack in an open field and a flatbed truck facing the wrong way on the other side of the road, guarded by a flagman in a wheelchair, and accompanied by a first responder ambulance just sitting there (presumably in anticipation of the wheelchair-bound flagman getting run over).  It was the kind of scene you’d imagine from a weird dream after you’d just eaten bad pork rinds just before bedtime.  In any event, it slowed us down enough to realize that Huntsville was now out of the question if we wanted to make the ballgame on time.

As we crossed the border into Alabama, we decided we needed to get pictures next to the “Welcome to Alabama” sign.  Of course, we decided this right after we had passed the sign on a two-lane highway with nowhere to pull off.  No legal U-turn, no problem…Gerry made like Kyle Bush celebrating a win at Watkins Glen, reversing field just past a blind curve without leaving the pavement.  In his justifiable haste, he had a hard time locating “reverse” on the gear shift (while we sat on the double-yellow line perpendicular to traffic coming at 60 mph from both directions).  Then he had trouble locating “drive” (remember, this is the dude that couldn’t find the parking brake).  To say that Scott contributed by screaming like a little girl would be to understate the composure of most little girls.  That we didn’t get T-boned by someone was a minor miracle.  But if we had, at least there was a first responder ambulance just a few miles back.

Not too far over the border in Florence, Alabama was lunch at Bunyans Barbeque, the very definition of a barbeque “joint”.  Their highly recommended rib sandwich had a thing or two you might not expect in a sandwich – like actual rib bones.  The restaurant itself did not have a few things that you might expect – like hygiene.  If you could get past the 90-degree heat and flies zipping around all over the place, you came to realize that you’d never find a better rib sandwich or warm blackberry cobbler.  The only thing keeping Bunyans from scoring a perfect 10.0 on the BIB culinary scale was that the menus did not appear to be laminated.

Now our itinerary had been pruned to the point where we would be heading directly to Birmingham (do not pass “Go”, do not collect $200), there would be enough time remaining to visit the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute and Vulcan Park.  The Civil Rights Museum turned out to be a diamond in the rough, very moving and tastefully done, set right across the street from the 16^th Street Baptist Church where Martin Luther King Junior had preached and where, sadly, four young girls were killed in a 1963 racially-motivated bombing.  Vulcan Park is home to the largest cast iron statue in the world, originally created as Birmingham’s entry into the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.  The statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, now overlooks the city and pays tribute to Birmingham’s roots in the iron and steel industry. The statue has a chest circumference of 22 feet 6 inches, roughly the same as Mark, since he began his health-crazed workout regimen several years ago.  It has a waist circumference of 18 feet 3 inches, roughly the same as the other three BIBs.  The status itself is 56 feet tall, but it sits atop a 123-foot pedestal that is encircled by an observation platform.  An adjoining elevator is connected to the observation deck by a steel grate walkway, through which one has an unobstructed view of the pavement below.  The Wallendas have made easier crossings.

For the second night in a row, the Garmin took us somewhere other than our intended ballpark.  Since we didn’t actually have Waze turned on at the time, Waze only picked up a half-game in the standings.  Fortunately, it got us close enough that we could use the ballpark lights in the distance to guide our way (the biblical allusion here being ironic, since you’d be hard-pressed to cobble together even one, let alone three, wise men from the four of us combined).  Scott had secured great seats, just a few rows from the field and between the plate and the visitors’ dugout on the third-base side of the diamond.  It was a great vantage point from which to see the Birmingham Barons fall 6-5 to the Chattanooga Lookouts on a two-run, ninth-inning rally.  It was an even better vantage point from which to watch a drunken, portly, female Baron’s fan riding the Lookouts all night.  Not to be confused with Chubby Checker, the rocker, this was Chubby Heckler, the talker.  When the game ended after the dramatic ninth-inning comeback, Brian Cavazos-Galvez, whose seventh inning 3-run homer had gotten the Lookouts on the board and keyed the comeback, motioned toward Chubby and yelled to no one in particular, “get her a cheeseburger”.

Just for good measure, on the way to the hotel from the ballpark, we missed our exit.  Can’t really blame the various GPS devices, as they were all screaming in unison to turn.  In the annals of great failed experiments, there will always be NASA’s Vanguard Rocket blowing up on the launch pad in 1957, the Edsel in 1958, New Coke in 1985, and “Gerry as BIB driver” in 2013.

To kick off day three, we were able to find a “Broken Egg” restaurant in the trendy Mountain Brook neighborhood of Birmingham.  We were thus able to reprise a visit that we’d paid to the original “Broken Egg” in Sarasota, Florida in 2005.  We are always welcomed like a family member when we enter trendy restaurants…more specifically, like Clark Griswold’s cousin, Eddie.  After breakfast, we set out on the long drive to our anchor destination of this trip, Memphis.  In keeping with the rapidly evolving civil rights theme of this trip, our first stop in Memphis was the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was killed.  The motel is now the site of the National Civil Rights Museum, and just a short distance from our next destination, Beale Street.  On Beale Street, we managed to secure seats for lunch right next to the stage at BB King’s.  We were in a hurry, because closing time at our next destination, Graceland, was fast approaching.  The stage seats are particularly convenient, because you can grab lunch while the stage amplifiers part your hair for you.  Nothing is quite as relaxing as the sensation of speed-eating shrimp and grits from what feels like the inside of a jet engine.

Graceland was our kind of place: tacky and full of gap-toothed tourists.  The irony of its juxtaposition with the Lorraine Motel is striking.  One is the site where one of the greatest leaders in our country’s history was felled by an assassin’s bullet.  The other is where a fat guy milking the last few bucks out of a fading career overdosed on a toilet.  At the Lorraine Motel, a few visitors paid their respects.  At Graceland, hundreds of folks paid $70 for the Entourage VIP Tour, like it was some sort of religious pilgrimage. You got the sense that Graceland is what Mecca would have been, if [deleted—we don’t want the NSA to “watch” us nor do we want a fatwah out on us!] had founded Sun Records instead of [that religion].

With a little time to spare before the Memphis Redbirds’ Triple-A game against the Oklahoma City Redhawks (so counting the visit to Graceland, we got to see Redbirds, Redhawks, and Rednecks all in one day), we took a quick detour between Graceland and the ballpark.  Most of us had never been to Arkansas, so we took the opportunity to drive across the Mississippi and look for an attractive spot to take a picture.  There wasn’t one.

We arrived back at the ballpark on the Tennessee side of the river a few minutes before 5:00pm – just in time to see the famed Peabody Ducks march from their lobby fountain to the elevator, for a trip to their pen on the roof of the Peabody Hotel.  Turns out the Peabody Hotel is only about a block from the ballpark.  Scott let the rest of us out while he parked the car.  Unfortunately for him, he picked a lot with an automated parking fee collection machine.  Dude can lead complex systems engineering projects using agile software development techniques and he’s Itzhak Perlman with a Stradivarius.  Ask him to use a parking meter and he’s Gerry releasing the emergency brake.

The Memphis Redbirds play in the Pacific Coast League.  At roughly 1600 miles away from the Pacific Coast, it would literally make more sense for the Toledo Mudhens to play in the Mexican League (Toledo is a mere 1500 miles from Mexico).  Good to know that someone is more geographically challenged than we are.  The game that night was billed as the birthday of Rockey the Rockin' Redbird, Memphis’ mascot.  So naturally, all of his mascot friends from nearby sports teams were there for the party.  In the 90-degree early evening temperatures and stifling humidity, you had to feel for whomever was stuffed inside those costumes.  Mark was able to achieve a BIB-first, catching a foul ball, which he generously donated to Kevin’s son, Corey.  The Memphis Redbirds lost 3-2, leaving the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth.

Scott had done a marvelous job with both seat selection and lodging reservations the whole trip…that is until we pulled up to the Bates Motel accommodations he’d acquired near the airport for our last night.  The place was under construction, the main entrance was unusable due to all the heavy equipment parked there, and the air conditioning didn’t seem to be fully functional.  But enough about its more charming elements.  As big as the place was, there didn’t seem to be another soul staying there besides us…at least until the middle of the night, when there suddenly seemed to be several hundred people partying in the hallways. Luckily, they were occasionally drowned out by the sound of airplanes flying by low enough that you could play charades with the passengers.  Or…if the heat got to be too much in your room, you could permanently drown out the hallway and aircraft noises by turning on your ear-splitting air-conditioning unit, going to grab some all-night take-out shrimp and grits, and reliving lunch at BB King’s.

Following that cruel sleep-deprivation experiment, we all flew out the next morning, with visions of BIB 2014 dancing in our heads.  Early indications are that we might return to the MidWest to take in a Cleveland Indians Game for the first time since we visited them at Cleveland Metropolitan Stadium.  Maybe we can catch a good Texas League Double-A team nearby.

The Brothers in Baseball 2012 Tour came early this year, when the Mid-West and East Coast Brothers flew in to San Franscisco Friday morning, May 4th, and Mark, the Left Coaster, after many circles in SFO, picked them up and headed right to the former Federal Penetentiary of Alcatraz Island.  Despite Kevin and Scott being delayed an hour, we just made our assigned 12:30pm ferry at Pier 33 and had a great tour of "The Rock."  From there we sat in Bay Area Friday Get-Away Traffic out to Stockton where we made the first pitch at the Stockton Ports game against the Lancaster Jethawks at the new Banner Island Ballpark--there was a "tin lunchbox" promotion, and we all got one!!  We were part of a crowd of 3,066 to see the hometown Ports drop a 3 to 2 decision to the Jethawks.

Saturday, we cruised around Old Sacramento and checked out Raley Field, home of the Scramento RiverCats, unfortunately out of town.  We toured the California State Railway Museum before heading up to Reno, NV to catch the Reno Aces taking on the Tacoma Raniers at their new Aces Ballpark.  We saw this team in their last year as the Tucson Sidewinders, but they moved north and west for the 2009 season.  In a very cold ballpark, we were among the hardy fans who stuck around to see the Aces pull out an 11 to 10 win!  We stayed in the Tahoe area Saturday night then took the 200 mile run down the mountain back to San Francisco where we saw the Giants take on Gerry's hometown Brewers at AT&T Park on Sunday afternoon.  Going in to extra innings, pinch hitter Hector Sanchez hit a walk-off single against a non-traditional five-man infield the BrewCrew set up with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 11th inning for a home-town 4 to 3 win. 

Here is our ever-pithy Kevin's full trip report!

2012 BIB Trip Report

Scott designs BIB trips just like the Parker Brothers game Jenga...move any piece and the tightly packed mess can all come crashing down.  The ceremonial first glitch to this year's trip (christened the Baysball Tour, since it began and ended in the Bay Area) was thrown out by Kevin, whose flight was cancelled.  In a bizarre twist, the flight was resurrected an hour later (“thank you for flying Lazarus Airlines”) when some mechanic apparently banged his palm on his forehead, remembering where he'd put the missing replacement part.  This made for a just-in-time arrival in San Francisco for the Alcatraz tour.  Had we been ten minutes later, we may have been the first men ever to contemplate how we were going to break in to Alcatraz.

Our first game of the trip was in chilly Stockton, California to see the hometown Ports take on the Lancaster Jethawks.  The game itself featured an inside-the-park home run (one of two home runs from Jethawks right fielder Adam Bailey) and two notable injuries.  First, the game's leadoff batter, Lancaster shortstop Jiovanni Mier, severely injured a hamstring rounding second and dropped as if someone from the stands had shot him with a crossbow.  A little while later, our beer vendor crumpled to the concrete just as quickly when his knee took on the metal armrest of an aisle seat and lost.  Mier may one day tell his grandchildren how his dreams of playing in the major leagues were put on hold as he was stretching for a triple that might set the pace for the game and inspire his team to victory.  The beer vendor may one day move out of his parents' place.

We spent the first night of this trip in Sacramento (so named for the soft candy-coated breath mints which the Spanish missionaries blessed and served to the original natives).  The power breakfast is a staple of any BIB trip.  On this trip, we experienced a tower breakfast.  The Tower Cafe is an ethnic restaurant in Sacramento that is equal parts Mexican, Asian, and Sanford-and-Son.  On this day, the featured special was "Relleno de Chihuahua".  We assume the dish was named for its origins in northern Mexico, not its origins at the SPCA.

At the California State Railroad museum in Sacramento, we learned that a Golden Spike means something besides peeing in someone's beer.  It turns out that Sacramento is where they began building the railroad from the west to meet up with the portion from the east at Promontory Point, Utah.  The cross-country railroad revolutionized the entire world in ways we'd frankly not considered.  Time zones, and therefore precise timekeeping, were a byproduct of the railroads.  Without the railroads, the movie "High Noon" could never have come to be.  Gary Cooper would have starred in "Around Midday-ish".  We even took a train ride along the Sacramento River.  It was here that we met a woman from Oregon that was right out of BIB trip central casting: the trash-talking senior citizen who gives us what for.  Most strangers we encounter understandably think we are to be either pitied or feared; either way, they usually leave us alone.  But about once each trip, someone - usually a female who vividly remembers the Eisenhower administration and nearly always a waitress (this instance was an exception) - finds us enough of a curiosity to invest some time in ridiculing us for sport. We made the mistake of inadvertently cutting in line in front of Oregon Lady at the train station and had to listen to her and her blue-haired posse mouth off about our lack of manners for the whole train ride.

And speaking of being fed up with people...our next stop was at Donner State Park.  The Donner party, as you may recall, was the group of settlers who got trapped by a snowstorm on their way west and, for lack of a sufficient supply of trail mix, went Hannibal Lecter on one another (entrail mix?).  Donner State Park recognizes the hardships encountered by those who blazed the trail westward.  It also recalls a watershed event in the development of proper dining etiquette...some of the more sordid and seldom-shared details of the ordeal seem to indicate that women of the Donner party were, in fact, always served first.

If Stockton was chilly, Reno, where the hometown Aces took an 11-10 victory from the Tacoma Rainiers, was downright cold.  We did get to stand in the sun before the game, though, for a batting practice jersey giveaway.  The jerseys were one-size-fits-all…and that’s accurate, as long as your definition of “fits” includes a sweater vest on a sumo wrestler.  Fittingly (as if that adverb had any place in this paragraph), it was Gerry - our Wisconsin native - who most resembled a kielbasa being stuffed into its casing.  We managed to get seats in Reno behind several women who spent much of the game dancing to the between-innings music, and just in front of an overly perky young couple whose non-stop banter was reminiscent of Alvin and the Chipmunks on amphetamines.  What we wouldn’t have given for a nine-inning complete game shut-up.  Our neighbors in the stands did provide a nice counterbalance to the creepy factor of Aces Ballpark, though.  First, there’s an inflatable "Mr. Baseball" that appears during the seventh inning stretch from behind the batter’s eye in centerfield.  It is a giant baseball-shaped head, probably 20 feet in diameter, that conjures a twisted blend of "Wilson the Volleyball" from the movie Castaway and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that bursts into flames in Ghostbusters.  You half expect this Franken-flatable to start spinning on its axis spewing pea soup all over the outfield.  Amazingly, Mr. Baseball is only the second creepiest character in the park.  “Archie” is the Aces’ Elmo-gone-bad red blob of a mascot, who roams the stands and speaks (yes, speaks) with the kind of spooky, gravelly voice that makes him sound like the forgotten love child of Vincent Price and Adele.  Between the raspy voice, some off-color jokes and occasionally suggestive gyrations, you can’t help but wonder if the Reno Aces’ publicity department actually posted a help-wanted ad looking for “heavy smoker…registered sex offender a plus”.  The commentary on a YouTube video of his antics actually wonders aloud whether he might not be “The World’s Most Perverted Mascot”.  

After the game, we spent the night at Mark's place in Tahoe...temperature inside 56 degrees when we arrived.  The frigid cold in such a remote place, all the earlier fascination with the Donner Party, and Gerry's kielbasa imitation naturally combined to trigger several discussions about which BIB would eat whom in a pinch.  For the record, it was decided that Mark's recent fitness regimen would leave him unacceptably chewy.  We were also introduced to Mark's deceased and cremated pets who now reside on or around the mantle of the Tahoe place: Rusty, Carrie, and Max (yes, Rusty is now Dusty).

Following 5:30am reveille, breakfast on Sunday was at Jax Truckee Diner (a.k.a., Jax at the Trax).  Truckee is a cute little town tucked in a valley between the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It looks for all the world like it was constructed for a miniature train display.  Then we were off to Mark’s “real” house in Alameda and a wind-blown ferry ride from Alameda to San Francisco to watch the Giants take on Gerry’s Brewers.  Having experienced two games that felt more like the Green Bay area than the San Francisco Bay area, and with a forecast high of only 71 degrees in the notoriously breezy city by the bay, we were all wearing jeans and carrying layers for the mile-or-so walk from the ferry terminal to AT&T Park.  Naturally, the sun chose this moment to make an unexpected appearance and create an afternoon of bakesball.  71 degrees, my eye. The temperature wasn’t the only thing in the eighties, however.  Willie Mays was at the park to celebrate his 81st birthday.  He was able to do so in style as the Giants beat the Brewers in 11-inning walk-off fashion.  Mark, who is an Oakland fan because he was born there, and an occasional  Giants fan because they win more often and K-mart was out of Yankees jerseys, provided the post-game entertainment by going into a rapturous fit that Gerry captured on Facebook when the last out was made. Brewers’ centerfielder Nyjer Morgan provided plenty of in-game entertainment.  Apparently, he is not on many Giants’ fans Christmas card lists after a 2011 incident in which he allegedly asked them collectively “how many fingers am I holding up?”  (the answer was one).  The fact that he made a great catch in left-center to end an inning just upped the ante on the lovefest.

After the game, we hiked to Murphy’s Irish Pub for a drink with Mark’s wife, Janet.  Mark and Janet then turned us on to Brandy Ho’s, an unmistakably authentic Hunan restaurant in Chinatown.  Completing the San Francisco ethnic trifecta was gelato in Little Italy.  For those of us heading out the next morning, it was time to head off to our hotel near the airport and begin awaiting Scott’s proposed plans for BIB 2013.  Early indications are that we may be doing an all-minor-league trip through the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama…just begging to be called the “Throw-the-Ball-Bayou” tour.

Another trip is part of history! BIB2011: the Journey to the Little League World Series!

As usual, Scott, our Planner Extraordinare, figured out the possible trips as soon as all the Major and Minor League Schedules came out, but this year he decided to throw us a knuckleball by adding the Little League World Series to the itinerary! Planning around that, the planets aligned in late August. Arriving Friday morning, we caught the Mets in their new digs in NYC, then "road tripped" to the middle of Pennsylvania to catch a couple of Little League World Series games and check out their museum, then we caught the Pirates on Sunday after paying our respects to the Flight 93 Memorial. As usual, we found some of the more odd and unusual roadside attractions across this wonderful land of ours as we travel from ballpark to ballpark. Read on to find out how much fun four fat old farts can have over a long weekend crammed in to a rental car.

2011 BIB Trip Report

It tells you all you need to know about the Brothers in Baseball that after our first day of BIB 2011, we found ourselves asking whether the best $10 we’d spent was on the pastrami or the freak show. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Upon landing at BWI airport on Friday morning, Kevin was greeted by a text message from Scott that said we’d have to meet Gerry at “lga”. Since Gerry was to land a few minutes behind Kevin at BWI, it wasn’t clear why he’d be at a grocery store (IGA, as any Midwesterner can attest, means “Independent Grocers Alliance”). Turns out that “lga” was actually “LGA”, or LaGuardia airport. In other words, due to a cancelled flight, Gerry would be landing a little more than 200 miles from where Mark and Scott had intended to pick him up. Last year, we had to cross town to recover Gerry’s late-arriving misdirected baggage. This year, we had to cross the eastern seaboard to recover a late-arriving misdirected Gerry.

Speaking of misdirected, Kevin assumed his traditional navigator’s spot in the passenger seat. It became obvious this year that Kevin is permitted to serve as navigator only because he brings a GPS…not because he actually knows how to use it. If Kevin had been piloting the Enola Gay, there’s a better-than-average chance that the first atomic bomb would have been dropped on Hoboken. After picking up Gerry, the Brothers descended on Coney Island exactly 9 days before Hurricane Irene did precisely the same thing. Thankfully, having lost some strength due to traveling over land for such an extended period, the disturbance caused only moderate damage. The hurricane may also have caused some problems. As you might suspect, the first Coney Island attraction of interest to the BIBs was hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous, the competitive eating capital of the world. After a short stroll along the boardwalk – and because these trips are all about finding little hidden bastions of understated elegance - we headed into the Coney Island Circus Sideshow to view the “freaks, wonders and human curiosities” (which is a little like Kojak paying money to see people with a receding hairline). BIB faves included the Illustrated Penguin (“Illustrated”, because his body is covered with tattoos and “Penguin” because – well, you’d just have to see for yourself) and Baron Von Geiger, who lifts brass anchors by way of attached fishhooks through his eye sockets. Kinda makes you want to go back to Nathan’s to slam another round of chili dogs, eh? We used our last few minutes at Coney to ride the historic Cyclone roller coaster, which has been at the corner of Surf Avenue and West 10th Street in Brooklyn since 1927.

We had to hustle back to Queens (where we’d just picked up Gerry a few hours earlier), to make sure we were in our seats at Citi Field in plenty of time to catch all of the 2 hour and 46 minute rain delay. It was only 2 years ago they finished building this park, and now it looked like they might need to start building an ark alongside it. Making the delay somewhat more tolerable was our discovery of the pastrami-on-rye at the concession stand in left field. A sandwich completely worthy of its New York origins, it was a sloppy delight with more fat than bread…just like the Brothers in Baseball. We also got to know a friendly, if somewhat orthodontically challenged, hot dog vendor. Dude’s mouth was a dental amusement park; when he smiled for a picture with us, you felt the urge to pay a dollar for three softball throws and a chance to knock out the remaining incisors. Once the baseball game resumed, we sat through 3 innings of it before we had to hop in the car and drive across Manhattan to Morristown, New Jersey. 

The area in and around Morristown is nostalgic for the Brothers, since we all met on an internship in New Jersey over 20 years go. Mark took us to one of his old culinary haunts for breakfast Saturday morning – the Minuteman Café in Bernardsville, New Jersey. An intriguing new addition to the breakfast menu at some point in the last 20 years was something called a “pork roll”. The waitress explained that it was “a New Jersey thing”. Drawing on what we recalled of New Jersey, that meant that the pork roll was either outrageously expensive, had an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the New York pastrami, or was just perpetually ill-tempered. Best we could tell, it was none of those…it was simply Spam. After breakfast, it was on to our morning nostalgia tour of New Jersey and the places we lived 20 years ago. What makes a nostalgia tour nostalgic is remembering things from 20 years go. Gerry couldn’t. He had to be shown where he used to live. He thought he remembered living on Smoke Rise Road in Bedminster, but had to be shown that he’d actually lived on Smoke Rise Lane. That little bit of confusion sent us driving in circles (in this case, without the aid of Kevin’s I-could-get-lost-on-a-merry-go-round sense of direction). When Gerry starts having to be shown the way to his own house, he just begs to have his middle name changed to “Atric”.

From New Jersey, we headed to the Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine in Ashland, Pennsylvania. There, we hopped onboard the mine cars for the 1/3 mile trip inside Mahanoy Mountain. About half-way in, a young boy, looking to be about 9-years-old, started screaming at the top of his lungs that he wanted to go back. The tour guide obliged and reversed the train of cars. As you might expect, the minute we came to a halt just outside the cave, the guide opened the door on the boy’s car and both boy and mildly-embarrassed mother disembarked. As you might not expect, Mark, who had apparently been quietly nursing himself into a claustrophobic panic attack for the last few minutes, stood up in our car, did his best Roberto Duran impersonation (“no mas”) and jumped over the side of the car onto the tracks, leaving behind his brethren and, at least metaphorically, his man-card.

Following the coal mine tour, we hopped back in the rental and headed for Williamsport. It was a little tougher now for Mark to drive, what with his skirt getting caught on the gas pedal and all (we kid because we love, Mark). Williamsport is quite the spectacle…a baseball oasis tucked among the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, somewhat reminiscent of Cooperstown. We arrived in time to catch the tail end of the Midwest (Rapid City, SD) vs. Southeast (Warner Robins, GA) game. More interesting, however, was the international game, pitting Mideast and Africa, or MEA (Dhahran, Saudi Arabia), against Europe (Rotterdam, Netherlands). Europe featured a kid with what has to me the best baseball name ever: “Diamond Silberie”. The MEA team, on the other hand, was full of kids with really exotic-sounding names like “Shane”, “Dylan”, “Tanner”, “Tyler”, “Brandon”, and “Jonathan”. Mideast, my eye…the team could just as easily have been from the Midwest. We left the international game about midway through to head to a minor league game across town, where the Williamsport Crosscutters were taking on the Jamestown Jammers. For those of you scoring at with us at home, that made three games that we’d seen portions of so far on the trip, without even coming close to sitting through a whole game. 

We arrived at the minor league game in the second inning (make that 4 partial games). The Crosscutters put on a great show, with some classic minor league stunts (fans sumo wrestling in oversized costumes, fans racing toy horses, fans racing from the midpoint between home and first in opposite directions while connected by a bungee cord that is oh-so-close to being long enough for them to reach the finish line) and some new twists (kids strutting with numbered placards between innings a la Las Vegas showgirls at a boxing match, and the inimitable BellyBusters contest that involves competitors attempting to eat 2 hot dogs, a pack of bologna, full jars of frosting and mustard, a 6-pack of Jello cups, and 2 loaves of bread – winner determined after others have either voluntarily bowed out or involuntarily burst like a piñata). The Crosscutters came out ahead on the scoreboard, 5-1, but likely did not produce more runs than – judging from the frequency of the winner’s trips to the restroom - the BellyBuster contest did.

After spending the night in Altoona (closest accommodations Priceline had to Williamsport that were rated above “manger”), we paid a visit to the Flight 93 Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When we visited, phase one of the permanent memorial was just being completed, for dedication on September 11, 2011. What strikes you about the location where Flight 93 came down is that while it is in the remotest of remote locations, it crashed at the bottom of a gentle slope, at the top of which is an abandoned strip mining operation with a paved approach road. In other words, it fell in a spot that provides a sort of natural amphitheater for visitors.

From Shanksville, we headed for PNC Park in Pittsburgh and a game between the Pirates and Reds. As we descended along the side of a mountain into Pittsburgh, Mark was entertaining us with some story or another just as a fully loaded car-carrying tractor-trailer began weaving in front of us. Mark calmly continued his story. Then, when we realized that a collision involving an RV had occurred a little further ahead, it became obvious that the car carrier wasn’t so much weaving as jack-knifing. Mark kept talking. Amazingly, Mark never did break his verbal stride, even as he weaved his way through the “Dukes of Hazard - Rust Belt Edition” unfolding around us. To this day, he probably thinks our white knuckles and flop-sweat were a result of his story being just that riveting.

We parked downtown in “the city of bridges” and walked across one of them to the park. Statues of Pirate greats – Mazeroski, Clemente, Stargell – grace the plaza outside PNC Park, and the view of the city beyond the outfield fence is worth the price of admission – especially when the price of admission is only $27 for seats in the lower deck, just one section away from being directly behind home plate. The only venue that lets you near a plate for less is IHOP (and, come to think of it, they never let you see their batter). Two rain delays insured that we’d need to leave the game early in order to get Gerry to his early evening flight and to get Mark and Scott back on the road to BWI that evening. They rain also insured that we would not see a single game in its entirety on this trip. In fact, Scott pointed out that we have become like “baseball ninja”, slipping into towns unnoticed, watching fractions of games, and then slipping out just as quickly as we came. His metaphor is a pretty good one. Except for the fact that ninja are physically fit, courageous warriors of supernatural intellect, we are exactly like ninja.

BIB2010: the Schwing through the Southwest Tour

Shortly after greeting Gerry and Kevin at the Albuquerque airport on Thursday, Mark, who is always responsible for securing the rental car, mentioned that he had gotten cataracts.  Kevin replied, “gee, that’s a nicer rental car than I’d anticipated”.  And with the throwing out of the ceremonial first pun behind us, we were off and running with BIB 2010.  While we’re on the topic of the rental car, there apparently is some sort of vast right wing conspiracy that prevents any car rental company from providing an unlimited mileage rate for pick-up in Albuquerque and drop-off in Denver.  As a result, we had a few hundred miles included in our rate, but were paying 33 cents per mile thereafter.  This fact, combined with the tighter-than-Joan-Rivers’ face nature of your average BIB, led to some interesting navigational tactics (“Mark, if you cut off the corner at this intersection by going diagonally across the parking lot you can shorten our driving distance by a factor of two-minus-the-square-root-of-two”).  It also made for a little tension as we had to determine which destinations were mile-worthy.  “Kevin, you need to pull off the nice, straight, efficient highway to go to the bathroom?  Leave a dollar on the dashboard.”  “Scott, the restaurant you really want to go to is a few blocks away?  Show us the money.”  “Gerry, your luggage won’t be in until later tonight and we need to go back to the airport from clear across town to retrieve it?!?  Clear across town, Gerry?!? Retracing those precious miles we just burned going precisely the other direction?!?  Do you think mileage just grows on trees?!?  I don’t even know who you are anymore!!!”

First stop after leaving the airport was for lunch at the Owl Café, a stuck-in-time 1950’s-style diner on Route 66 and home to the “Green Chile Cheeseburger”, which is just hot enough to form beads of sweat on one’s brow.  The same could be said of a thoroughly tattooed young waitress who provided an interesting photo-negative to the blond motherly-type waitress that waited our table, and in every respect but hair color could have posed for the cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America album.  We got both of them to pose for a picture with Gerry and Kevin…looks like the cantina scene from Star Wars.   From the Owl Cafe it was on to the Sandia Peak Tramway, the world’s longest aerial tramway at 2.7 miles, a mile and a half of it in a single, unsupported span.  Sandia Peak seemed like the perfect first attraction on our trip – maybe it was the view; maybe it was the fresh thin air and the unearthly quiet at the top; or maybe it was the unparalleled joy of realizing that between the up and the down rides, we’d be knocking off 5.4 miles that we wouldn’t have to pay for.

We had originally planned to go to a ballgame in Albuquerque on Friday, after returning from Roswell, but a quick discounted cash flow analysis on the mileage implications of returning to Albuquerque vs. driving straight from Roswell to Santa Fe motivated us to take in an Albuquerque Isotopes game on Thursday evening against the Oklahoma City Redhawks.  Never mind that the ‘Topes lost 8-1.  Isotopes Park is a BIB kind of place.  The concession stands sell something called a Frito Chile Pie, the only food item on earth that is unhealthy enough that it should require a three-day waiting period before purchase.  They also have park benches where you can get your picture taken sitting next to life-size statues of the Simpsons cartoon characters…or just Marge, if you’re Homer-phobic.  It also didn’t hurt that our seats were close to home plate, right behind the ballplayers wives’ section.  Who says there aren’t quality curves in the minor leagues?

We stand corrected.  Turns out there is at least one more entrée (also in Albuquerque nonetheless) that should be subject to concealed carry laws.  Witness the “Sloppy Papa”, described as “A mountain of fresh hash browns with your choice of red and/or green chile, cheddar and jack cheeses, topped with two eggs any style, and served with a tortilla, scratch made gravy, diced bacon, and sausage.”  Just saying it in one breath will threaten your respiration.  Actually eating one will shut down the rest of your vital signs.  We stumbled onto this monster when Friday morning, we invested a few of our precious miles in a drive to the nearest of several local breakfast places called Weck’s.  The fact that the face of their menu says “A Fully Belly Tradition Since ‘91” should have put us on an elevated alert stage.  The fact that the very first thing out of the waitress’ mouth was “Our portions are pretty huge” should have signaled a threat level orange.  When she asked us if we’d like to share a cinnamon roll appetizer and pointed to a few examples roughly the size and weight of an unabridged dictionary, it was clear that this was a DEFCON 1 breakfast situation.   A perfect way to carb-load before three and a half hours of car-bound inertia on the 250-mile drive to Roswell.

How little is there to see between Albuquerque and Roswell?  Perhaps the most interesting thing we encountered along the way were the frequent sightings of cattle and horses roaming completely free – in other words, they could have walked right onto the roads if they’d wanted to.  Maybe they were wild.  Maybe their owners had somehow trained them to stay close to home.  Or maybe they’d set out on their own before, only to find what we did – that New Mexico between Albuquerque and Roswell is a barren wasteland.  Oh yeah – almost forgot – along route 380, we stopped in the town of Lincoln, New Mexico, purported historical home of Billy the Kid.  There we found what appeared to be an abandoned amphitheater there where they annually re-enact The Last Escape of Billy the Kid.  Whatever.   By the time we got to Roswell, we were less starved for lunch than for surroundings that resembled something other than the face of the moon.  We pulled into a place called Farley’s, ordered drinks and asked our waiter what we should see first in Roswell.  His answer: “Nothing.”  Dude clearly doesn’t work for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Roswell is, of course, the location where aliens are reported to have crashed in 1947 (they would have landed in Arizona, but were prohibited from doing so by controversial immigration statutes).  The city has embraced its quirky reputation.  Streetlights are painted to look like extraterrestrial beings.  Every fast-food restaurant has a statue of an alien visitor.  Every car dealership seems to have a big inflatable Martian.  There are more people showing off how green they are in Roswell than at the Democratic National Convention.  The rasion d’être for our visit to Roswell was the UFO Museum and Research (tee-hee!) Center.  It’s a place that is equal parts art gallery, science fair, haunted house and novelty store.  Kind of like the entire city of Roswell, you can tell it wants so badly to take itself seriously, but just can’t quite keep a straight face.

Friday evening was very unBIB-like (except, of course, for the monster drive back across the lunar surface – this time from Roswell to Santa Fe – that was precisely like us).  For starters, we had no baseball game to see Friday.  Instead, we actually had a nice sit-down dinner at the provocatively named “Ore House” on Santa Fe Plaza.  We followed that up with a remarkably civilized evening watching the entertainment (Hispanic dancers and a guitarist) on the Plaza stage and even took a walk past the St. Francis Cathedral Basilica before retiring to a strikingly nice Marriott Courtyard on the southwest side of town.

Saturday morning was like a reverse hangover.  “Did we not go to a ballgame last night? Did we have a dinner that didn’t come in a bun?  Seems like we did something cultural that involved music and maybe even a church.  And OMG…this hotel is clean!!!”  We shook it off and headed directly to the IHOP next door to get our collective heads (and blood sugars) into proper misalignment.  Heaping helpings of bacon, eggs and pancakes put everyone back into standard BIB operating mode.  Everyone but Kevin, that is, who noticed – for the first time apparently - that the “I” in “IHOP” stands for International.  He opted for Machaca, a Mexican dish that doesn’t appear anywhere on those Midwestern IHOP menus.

If the round-trip drive to Roswell was like watching paint dry, the drive north from Santa Fe into Colorado was like Bea Arthur’s career…seemed to go on forever, but not much to look at.  In fact, we were so running out of things to talk about in the car that the most interesting conversation centered on who should be first to go in the event that we got stranded on one of these trips and had to resort to cannibalism (in case you’re wondering, it was a draw – we’re already sufficiently fed up with each other).  The New Mexico/Colorado state line provided an opportunity to step out of the car, take a few pictures, and catch some fresh air before one of us went Hannibal Lecter on the other three.

Our arrival at the Great Sand Dunes National Park came none too soon.  The Dunes are an impressive 750 feet tall at their peak and cover 19,000 acres.  Scott, Kevin, and Mark decided to take a walk and in the span of about 30 minutes explored as much as one of them.  The sight of the three of them trudging across the dunes – Kevin sans shoes – made for a sort of Fred-Flintstone-Meets-Ishtar moment.  After taking a few pictures, it was time to “hit the road”…a phrase Mark apparently misheard as “hit the rodent”, because not a mile outside of the visitor center his left front tire turned a squirrel into a squish.

As we drove through some of the more remote regions of Kiss-My-Cousin County, Colorado in search of lunch, we stumbled on the Old West Café in Ft. Garland.  Gerry was the first to notice that there was no light in the bathroom, so going number one was like playing one of those carnival race games where you aim the water pistol at the bullseye, only here it was like doing so while wearing a blindfold.  Couldn’t have been a better restaurant for Kevin to dump a jumbo iced team on his torso.  That induced the need for a complete(!) change of clothes, which, in turn, induced a performance worthy of a contortionist.  Kevin had to execute each of the five basic ballet positions in the dark telephone booth of a bathroom, while simultaneously cracking the door just enough to make sure that when he dropped trou, it wasn’t into the toilet.  

We left Ft. Garland and drove north toward Canon City, home of the remarkably scenic and historic Royal Gorge Route Railroad, Royal Gorge Bridge, and Winery at Holy Cross Abbey…none of which sounded as appealing to us as the only place we visited: the Museum of Colorado Prisons.  We spent over an hour at the prison museum (which, it should be noted, is located adjacent to the east wall of an actual active prison).  Once we got back on the road, we were left with a scant 20 minutes to stop at the Garden of the Gods (“GOG” to the locals) in Colorado Springs before an evening ballgame.  Royal Gorge, Holy Cross Abbey, Garden of the Gods…nope, none of those sound like a place you’d want to spend much time…not like a place with the word “Prisons” in its name.

Saturday evening’s ballgame was Salt Lake City Bees vs. Colorado Springs Sky Sox at Security Service Field.  Of all the beautiful places you could put a stadium in Colorado Springs, someone decided that the ideal locale was in the east suburbs, where the view beyond the outfield walls was of a prefab subdivision, rather than the mountains.  If the venue was uninspiring, the game, which pushed the Sky Sox over their all-time season attendance record, was anything but.  The Sky Sox’ ran out a bunch of guys who have been to the show, including Kazuo Matsui, Jay Payton (who was the star of the game, hitting a 3-run jack), Travis Metcalf, Brad Eldred, and pitchers Luis Ayala, Greg Smith, and Juan Rincon.  Any mention of pitchers on this trip, by the way, was punctuated by Gerry harassing Scott over his inability to clearly enunciate “pitcher” vs. “picture” in such a way that the rest of us could distinguish which of the two he was talking about.  Strange none of us had noticed this before…and more than a little creepy as we all retraced our steps of the last 20 years, during which we’d all assumed it was photos of San Diego Padres that Scott had in his room as a child.  The 7-2 Sky Sox victory also featured one of the better mascots we’d ever seen in “BirdZerk”, a character that travels from ballpark to ballpark providing between-innings entertainment.  There were also postgame fireworks, also a BIB favorite – particularly to Mark, for whom fire in the sky normally means either another brushfire in the Bay area hills or that the West Oakland gangs have gotten their hands on explosive devices.

With the lightning-round visit to GOG already under our belts, we found ourselves looking for things to do on Sunday morning.  In an audible worthy of Peyton Manning, Scott whipped up an itinerary that included going 11 miles (that’s $3.30) out of our way to a Cracker Barrel (it should be noted that in BIB vernacular, “Sunday morning service” is what the waitress provides), followed by a visit to the Manitou Springs Cliff Dwellings and a remarkably scenic drive through the Rockies.  We saw quite a few folks fly-fishing in the beautiful mountain streams on our way to Denver.  Didn’t see anyone actually catch any flies, though.  

We arrived at Coors Field with only a few minutes to spare before game time.  The Rockies won another entertaining game 10-5, punctuated by Carlos Gonzalez’ hitting two home runs and Manny “Cousin It” Ramirez’ one-pitch last at bat as a Dodger.  Manny stepped in to pinch hit, took a called strike, argued, and got thrown out as his last official act before taking his braided locks to the Sox.

Following the game, we headed for the airport as the reality began to set in that our 4-day recess was almost over and we needed to go back to working and playing well with others for another 361 days or so.  Along the way, someone remembered that we had failed to conduct the official business of BIB 2010, including our ceremonial annual vote on whether to allow family members on future trips.  Gerry moved that we entertain a motion to allow it.  Scott seconded.  After 3.8 seconds of vigorous debate, the motion was rejected unanimously and BIB 2010 was officially adjourned.