It’s kind of weird for me to mentally go back in time a little bit to be writing this post, but it was a pleasant enough of a trip to where I knew I was going to eventually write something about it, but time permitting, I simply didn’t have the opportunity to write when I got back. However, being the reminiscing nerd that I am, I actually jotted down notes and blurbs about my recent travels through upstate New York that I figured I wanted to address when I had the opportunity to.
As for all the pictures I took in New York and Pennsylvania, I’m not sure how many people would be remotely that interested in what were primarily baseball photos, except for maybe some scenic stuff in Rochester, but anyway, I actually back-dated the posts to the dates of their original trips, and posted them as well. Obviously, they’re also available in the “photos” section of my site, but to be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sure how many people actually use that function.
The weekend prior to the insanity that was Dragon*Con, I actually spent four days traveling through upstate New York, on my annual baseball road trip with my boy Huzzard, a tradition that has gone on strong for the last six baseball seasons now. In lieu of an expensive Major League road trip where we could see like, one new ballpark in a major city, we decided to traverse the lesser-driven roads of America and see several minor league ballparks, which we both tend to agree are more rewarding, and frankly more economically efficient.
In the time we traveled, we visited ballparks in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. We attempted to hit up a fourth ballpark in Auburn, but were met with an unfortunate rain storm that put the nix on that plan, but I’ll get back to that in a little bit.
But overall, the trip went well, I think. I swear, I could have been an Apple commercial on this trip, based on how reliant I was on my iPhone during the whole time. From utilizing maps and traffic via Waze, to how often I was using it to find restaurants, bars, and most importantly Tim Hortons restaurants, I was often on my phone in the car finding out where to go next.
The one key thing my phone contributed towards was the finding of lodging. See, we had gone into this trip with pretty much zero preparation with where we were going to stay. In prior years, we had kind of left things to chance, and since we’re both pretty simple salt-of-the-earth kind of guys, glitz and luxury really aren’t that important to us, and lodging is pretty much a bed to sleep in, a tub to shower in, and a place to store our shit without worrying about it getting stolen (because in Syracuse, if they can see it, they can steal it, apparently). In the past, we’ve relied on chance and the game of chance, known as staying at whatever roadside hovels were the cheapest and available. We have named such places as “Kingdom Cities” based on a particularly charming Red Roof Inn we had stayed in, located in Kingdom City, Missouri.
Apparently, the world doesn’t really work in this way anymore, and randomly seeking out Kingdom Cities doesn’t appear to be the most efficient way of finding spontaneous lodging anymore. On this trip, I discovered the wonders of Hotwire.com, and essentially found four nights of lodging for roughly around $100 a person. Because companies like Hotwire buy up all of the empty rooms in advance and float it to last second travelers like us, it’s apparently really easy to get a cheap and efficient room without the hassle of playing games stopping at 3-4 Kingdom Cities trying to find the best rates.
And amazingly, they’re not all shithole hovels too. The place we stayed in just outside of Rochester, in Webster, was a brand-spanking new Holiday Inn Express where the beds were huge, the rooms huge, and the bathrooms clean. And everyone who worked there was young and mostly attractive females, surprisingly. Syracuse and Harrisburg also weren’t bad either, but most importantly, neither joint was ever over $68 a night between two people. I think I’m pretty sold on Hotwire whenever it comes to spontaneous travel again in the future, or if I ever get stranded overnight anywhere again.
Although baseball was the objective of the trip, these trips are always so much more than just the baseball games we watch. It’s about the journey, and seeing new places and experiencing new things and trying new food and drinking local brews. The trip took us through the rural part of west Pennsylvania, where it was discovered that one, data really ceases to work in the Appalachian mountains, and that there’s a very eerie similarities to why Left 4 Dead seemed to take place in the Allegheny region of that part of the state.
Also, it was my naïve impression that Wawa owned the entire state of Pennsylvania, but apparently, somewhere in the middle is a very defined line where it’s clear that Wawa territory ends, and it’s solely Sheetz territory. Why does PA seem to have the stronghold on two of the most cult-loved gas/convenience stores on the east coast?
As for the cities themselves, I would have to go ahead and rate them as such:
- Rochester
- Auburn
- ???
- Syracuse
- Buffalo
I just want to make sure that there’s a distinct difference when it comes to Syracuse and Buffalo in comparison to places like Rochester and Auburn. Neither Syracuse or Buffalo were at all that impressive, and to their credit we didn’t stay in each very long, even less for Buffalo, but still, when a city charges major league prices for parking and admission to a minor league game, there are some penalties to be had there.
Rochester was at least a city with character, history, and plenty of things to do, and plenty of places to eat. The ballpark was the best among the three upstate ballparks, and there weren’t that many instances of not having something to do. Auburn has the charm that many really small towns do, with tiny stores, intimate little pubs where locals all stare at you funny for walking in, and prices that seem like they haven’t realize that it’s not the 1980s anymore, as well as a beautiful drive through wine and orchard country to get there.
As for Syracuse, I’m baffled how my sister was able to live there for four years while going to college up there, because it’s a dreadfully boring city with pretty much nothing to do. Even for the college students, there didn’t appear to be a whole lot going on around the college itself, and there wasn’t really that much going on around the slightly off-proximity either. Not to mention that it gets cold like in September and doesn’t necessarily relent until around May, from what I understand. I dig cool weather and all, but even I’d begin to get cabin fever from being in a place like Syracuse.
Buffalo is a place I’ve been to a few times actually, and it’s nothing that impressive to me. Aside from visiting the place where the buffalo wing was purportedly invented, the Anchor Bar, there’s really not a whole lot else I liked about the place. It’s kind of a tourist place that tries to impress Canadians into crossing the border, and the fact that they’re close to Niagara Falls makes them kind of inflate everything else to capitalize on the tourism aspect of visitors. Overall, I’m not impressed, and there was a reason why we left Buffalo and went straight to Rochester instead of staying there overnight.
As I mentioned before, we were rained out of our game in Auburn, which was the second time that I’ve ever been rained out on a trip. The first time also happened a few weeks ago, and both would mark that out of all the years I’ve done baseball trips, these are the first times that rain has played into the outcome of the games. I know it’s silly to be mad at the weather, as it’s truly something that we cannot control, but 2013 has been a pretty rainy year outright, and frankly, I think we’re all kind of exasperated with the rain in general.
The ballparks themselves, I’ll save the words for their eventual individual posts, and eventual entries into my baseball parks website, which is waiting in the pipeline of things I need to eventually get to writing about in the vast future.
As for the trip in its entirety, it was definitely a good one. I saw some new ballparks, and got to see parts of the country that I probably never would have really made any effort to see without the excuse of baseball, which kind of makes me wonder that that might exactly be the point. Stopping at roadside orchards to where I could try to flirt with the pretty girl giving me cider samples, and discovering that New Yorkers can’t do the barbecue game were important experiences that good to know in the future. And walking onto beautiful waterfronts, surrounded by gigantic lakes and vast expanses of nothing or nature, needing me to remind myself that I’m actually in the state of New York; a state that’s so associated with the city, which actually makes up barely 1/75th of the entire state, but manages to dominate the entire perception of the state as a whole, to realize that there’s way so much more than a dingy overrated city that makes up what actually is a pretty beautiful state outside of it.
