Clintercity

Well, I guess it should go without saying that I've neglected my blog for the past few months. I only had one post left from my trip to South America last summer, and here's the summary of it in a sentence: Machu Picchu was incredible. I went to Washington after that for a little family reunion, saw the Mariners lose against the Yankees unfortunately, and came back to New York for year 2 of law school. Year 2 is now over, as of Friday, and I am leaving tonight on a trip to see baseball games all over the eastern half of the United States. In honor of my trip, I posted a picture I took with my phone last year in Pittsburgh at PNC Park, which is a beautiful place to watch a baseball game. And since the Pirates are so bad, they basically pay you to watch the games.

This is the order of cities that I am going to visit, with a baseball game in every city (two in Chicago): Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Savannah (to see the Savannah Sand Gnats in America's oldest minor league baseball park!), St. Petersburg, and Miami. I have an unlimited travel bus pass from Greyhound that will take me from city to city. This schedule works out pretty well, while it is all not as fluid as it could be mainly because you can't just go from city to city each day and see a game; every team plays half of its games on the road, which means that many days they are not playing at home. This is the reason for a little bit of zig zagging. Otherwise, I would go to Cleveland first, probably, then Detroit, etc. It should be quite the adventure. You can catch all of the action right here. I'll have my iPod with me, which means I'll be updating this blog with my travels every so often.

You might ask where I got this idea. When I was thinking about where I would attend law school, I was often in touch with a good friend who also loves baseball. I was thinking about going to school in Virginia, and we thought about all of the stadiums within ten or so hours of the place where I would be living. We agreed to do a trip like this in the summer of 2009 if we were both not married. Well, she got married, I went to Brazil, it didn't happen. But as I was trying to figure out my summer plans and found a summer internship here, I started to think about how I wanted to do it even if it was by myself. I found out that I had two weeks between the end of school and my summer internship, and so I started making plans. Everything has worked out beautifully on paper, and let's hope it works out over the next two weeks. I am going as far away from New York as I can because those are the toughest stadiums to get to. The ones that I have not visited that are closer (Baltimore, DC, etc.) are ones I can get to in a day or a weekend. But I guess the underlying motivation here is that this trip will be a connection of a love for baseball and the enjoyment I get out of facing certain challenges (fun ones, not normal life challenges).

Here are some of the pros and cons of my trip. First, the cons. One is that there is not a lot of room for error. For most of the legs of my trip, I have multiple contingency schedules and plans. That is not a problem as much as potentially missing a game because of weather or some other unexpected obstacle. For example, tomorrow night it is supposed to rain in Detroit. If a game is rained out, there is no room for waiting a day to catch another game. Another con: riding the bus for two weeks. Some of these bus rides will be lengthy: Minneapolis to Cleveland, New York to Detroit, Miami to New York (36 hours). That last one will be a little bit of a beast. The nice thing about it all is that I've been through a few of these before in countries where riding a bus can be scary and uncomfortable (for example, read here about the 48 hour boat ride down the Amazon or here about the 50 hour bus ride a few days later in another part of Brazil or here which is the beginning of a series of stories about the long trip from La Paz to Cuzco, Peru. Or if you're looking for more reading about interesting activities involving bus rides, read here about almost getting a machine gun stuck in my face at the end of another bus ride.) Another con...being in some of these cities late at night.

So there are some definite cons, but think about the pros: twelve baseball games in two weeks. The cost-benefit analysis can stop right there because that benefit alone outweighs the costs. Think about the things I'll see: Wrigley Field, some of baseball's best hitters (for example, tomorrow night I will see Magglio Ordonez swing the bat, which is poetry in motion) and pitchers, America, cities I've never been to or haven't been to since I was a kid, some old friends, and so forth. I'm excited to see how it all turns out. First stop is Detroit and the bus leaves in a few hours. Stay tuned.