Again, I must apologize. I promised to blog daily about my trip to Florida and Spring Training, but never quite got around to it. I did manage to post a bunch of picture on Facebook, so if you go to my page (Jeff Wadsworth) you'll see about 40 or so shots of sunny, kind-of warm West-coast Florida. We left on a very chilly (33 degrees) morning from Baltimore, after a rather unusual drive down from Harrisburg. My son Mike had some car issues, so he was driving my regular daily driver and I got to go in the Vanagon. In case you don't recall from last years' posts, I acquired a 1982 VW Vanagon camper. I was a bit apprehensive about driving that distance, but the van did well, with the exception of developing a small hole in the exhaust. I was stopped in the morning rush hour traffic on the beltway near the airport and thought it sounded louder than normal and when I reached the parking lot, looked underneath and discovered a hole big enough to put my thumb in. It was going to be a noisy trip home. After negotiating my way through the airport and finding my brother-in-law Ed, we boarded our plane to head south. we had 1 stop in Atlanta, my least favorite airport in the USA. After escaping from there, we made it to Tampa in good time. It wasn't quite as warm as I expected when we exited the airport and couldn't really even have the windows down in the car on the way to the hotel. Our hotel was just a short drive from the airport, just right up the street from George Steinbrenner Field, spring training home of the New York Yankees and Raymond James Stadium, home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It would be a reasonable walk from the hotel to the ballpark, not bad at all. Unfortunately, the hotel was completely infested with Yankees fans! What way to start a vacation. we should have expected as much, but it was disgusting. Oh well, I guess if you win the World Series you've got bragging rights. After getting a little grub at a local sports bar and catching up on the basketball tournament, we headed over to Steinbrenner. It was probably the nicest of the 4 ballparks we visited, definitely had the most amenities. It was a sell-out crowd for the game, about 10500 in the house. we met people from all over the place that evening, and not just New York. The guys sitting beside us were from Sioux City, Iowa and Yankee fans to boot. They were just like us, in town for a few days of baseball. And the people sitting behind us were from Portland, Maine. They confessed to being Red Sox fans, but stayed in Florida for the winter months and decided to catch a Yankees game. Just scouting the enemy I guess. After a parachute drop-in by the Navy Seal sky-diving team, the game got under way. Nothing truly exciting to report, however, the youth baseball team sitting in front of us consumed an incredible amount of cotton candy, much to the delight of the very animated and entertaining guy who was selling the stuff. It wouldn't surprise me if those kids ran the whole way home and never slept a wink from all the sugar. Anyway, the Yanks won and we headed back to the hotel to check the basketball scores and then pack it in for the night. We had a 1:05 date in Bradenton to catch the Pirates/Red Sox, so we had to be on our way fairly early, to locate our next hotel and meet up with Ed's daughter/my niece Becky. All described in the next segment.
Stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment