Tag: travel

The weekend I’d been looking for

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Prior to the start of the baseball season, this past weekend was one particular weekend that I had mentally earmarked as one of weekends that I was looking forward to the most.  Sure, I have ambitions and plans of grandeur when the summer arrives, and in a perfect world, I make every flight, the weather is never an issue, and I’m able to tackle four new MLB and six new MiLB ballparks before the start of July.  However, things haven’t worked out so kindly throughout the span of the last few weeks, and be it poor weather, unlucky flight conditions or both, a lot of my trips have been derailed and ultimately cancelled, leaving me kind of distraught, and with more time to brood and go crazy.

But this past weekend was undoubtedly the one weekend I was looking forward to immensely, because it combined several things going for it that if they all worked out, would lead to a successful good time.

Fortunately for me, with the weekend now a time frame in the past, I can say that basically everything did work out, and it was a successful good time, and I’m quite pleased with it, to the extent that it’s worth writing about, because frankly, I think a lot of my posts throughout the last few weeks have kind of had an undertone of disappointment or an unhappy sentiment to some of them.

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Ballparks: Minute Maid Park, Houston, Texas

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Last Sunday, I visited Minute Maid Park, the home of the Houston Astros in Houston, Texas.  This makes #25 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams visited.

As for the ballpark itself, it was nice.  It’s not going to be my favorite, because I personally think baseball is best played in true outdoor fashion, and a retractable roof doesn’t really count.  But it’s also not the worst ballpark I’d ever been to before either.

Read about it, and many, many more ballpark experiences on my sporadically updated ballpark site.

The Booker T crime tour

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For those of you who actually look at the pictures I take on my random travels, whom might have been curious to why there were pictures of me in front of a Wendy’s while I was in Houston, this was not a coincidence, nor was it a spontaneous moment of having to take goofy selfies right then and there.

That particular Wendy’s was the Wendy’s where former five-time, five-time, five-time, five-time, five-time WCW champion Booker T worked at for two years when he was a teenager. This is notable, because it was around this time when aside from working at Wendy’s, he also had a separate career going on simultaneously, robbing them.

Yes, the wrestling Hall of Famer, Booker T, was a convicted felon in his youth, and this information is ironically riotous to a guy with a twisted sense of humor like me.

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Photos: An afternoon in Houston, Texas

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As I’ve always said, baseball is the perfect excuse to get out and travel, and see places that I never gave much thought to.  I’d never been to Texas before in my life; it’s not that I’ve never wanted to go to Texas before, but I’ve never really had any excuse to go prior to the pursuit of baseball parks.  I don’t know enough about the areas and cities, and there’s never been any sort of event or occurrence in any Texas that has drawn my attention to demand a warranting trip (that I’ve been able to make happen).  But thanks to wanting to visit all the baseball parks, I have reasons to visit Texas, when the opportunities present themselves.

And as my schedule revealed, I had the opportunity to make a day trip to Houston over the weekend.  First time visiting the state of Texas, seeing a city I’d never been to before, and take in a ballpark that makes me one ballpark closer to having visited all 30 Major League teams.  I didn’t spend a tremendous amount of time in the city, since I had a few small objectives, and with a baseball game, there wasn’t a massive amount of free time to simply explore and wander too much, but for what it’s worth, I had a pretty decent afternoon in Houston.

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Real Men Don’t Wear Small update: Grapefruit League

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For the second year in a row, Real Men Don’t Wear Small gets updates prior to the start of the regular season!

I made my first-ever trip to Spring Training, down to Florida to partake in some Grapefruit League action, as well as see some Spring Training complexes.  The first park visited was who else?  The Braves’ spring training facilities on the Disney complex in Orlando, and a game at Champion Stadium (They lost, of course).  And then I headed south for a day to visit Port St. Lucie, where a visit to Tradition Field, the spring home of the New York Mets awaited.

Spring Training baseball was surprisingly more crowded than I thought it would be, especially considering my choice time of visit was within the final weeks.  I naively expected it might not be as crowded, but contrarily it was packed for both games; at least until the starters began getting pulled.  It was fun nonetheless, and I’m certainly more open-minded in the future for future Spring Training trips.

Photos: Port St. Lucie, Florida – Tradition Field

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The second leg of my Spring Training baseball travels took me from busy touristy Orlando, down to the sleepy, seemingly retirement community of Port St. Lucie, Florida.  It was a pleasant reprieve from the traffic and endless gauntlet of toll roads in Orlando.

Despite the fact that Tradition Field is the home to the stinking Mets, I actually really liked the place, even over the Braves’ Champion Stadium.  This really isn’t that big of a surprise, considering the exorbitant extravagance that was a ballpark in Orlando, compared to a smallish baseball venue out in Port St. Lucie.

The funniest thing about Tradition Field is that being home to the Mets, the general area around Port St. Lucie appears to be crawling with northern transplants, and lots of tourists from New Jersey and New York.  And despite being in a sleepy old Florida coastal town, we were subjected to some very New York-like mannerisms, like having to actually pay to park in a deserted grass field, and being accosted by ticket scalpers, at a Spring Training exhibition game that doesn’t actually count.  You can take the scumbags out of New York but you can’t take the New York out of the scumbags.

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Photos: A Day at MegaCon 2014

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At long last, the MegaCon pictures have been finished.  I’d say it took longer than I had expected, but considering the seemingly endless quest to try to find a happy medium in which I like to display pictures I take, I guess it’s no surprise that it took a full week after all.

In a single day, I managed to take well over 200 pictures, and because I have little idea what I’m doing with a camera, turns out that quite a few were unusable and blown out, because I foolishly keep shooting into the sun, and combined with my determination to competently shoot in full manual mode, mistakes occur.  Regardless, when the smoke cleared, I still had right about 200 photos to share with the world.

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