Tag: travel

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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Thoughts on MegaCon

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Preview image: I think this Kayle costumer is beautiful.

No, this isn’t the post with all the pictures; I’m still working on them. I took over 200 pictures in the one day that I went to MegaCon, so it’s taking me a little bit of time to review and process them. I’ll admit that it’s times like this that I miss when the editing process was sizing down a bunch of jpegs that took substantially less time, but at the same time, even though I’m a noob amateur with a camera, the quality of pictures that I’m taking now are substantially superior. I’ll take that trade off, even if it leads to being more time consuming.

Anyway, I’ve got a little bit of time to write, so I felt like jotting down some words about the MegaCon experience, in general, before they vanish from mind, and I’ll feel dumb if I blab on about it way later.

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Photos: Orlando, Florida – Champion Stadium

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My first ever Spring Training baseball trip brought me down to Orlando, Florida, where I would visit who else but my Atlanta Braves first?  To be honest, Spring Training had never been really high on my priority list, but the idea of taking in some new places, hanging with some friends and most importantly, simply getting away from the routine grind of normalcy made this trip possible.

Although I did enjoy the experience of seeing the Braves’ spring facilities and have zero regrets about making the trip, I have to say that I wasn’t really too big on the place as a whole.  I kind of had a preconceived idea that I might not like it, because the Braves spring facility is located on Disney property, and where there’s Disney property, there’s bound to be massive crowds, a logjam of people, and kind of a hectic atmosphere, all of which turned out to be the case.

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Spring Training heckling fun

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Aside from the obvious enjoyment derived out of visiting new places and watching baseball with good company during my recent Florida excursion, there were two moments that stood out a little bit higher than everything else. Or more specifically, two baseball players, who took my light-hearted ribbing and ran with it, much to the enjoyment of myself and everyone around me.

One of the biggest appeals of Spring Training baseball is that it’s supposed to be a relaxed environment for all parties, but mostly the players, so they can ease their bodies back into playing shape, chip off some of the rust that built up over the long winter, and get used to the motions of playing baseball on a regular basis again. The results of spring games do not matter, and it’s more important that they go through the reps and fortify the physical motions to make sure that everything’s working right.

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Filling up the proverbial plate

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Preview image from MegaCon – these guys were my favorites

I just got back home after spending the last few days down in Florida, for a fairly loosely planned trip, basically to get out into the world and do things.  Needless to say, I do not sleep well in random two-star hotels, so I’m a little bit weary having going straight back to work after flying back.

But before I put myself back into a self-imposed mountain of personal tasks of writing things, processing and editing a ton of pictures to share with the rest of the internets, I will say that it was a very good trip, that I have no regrets about (actually, there is one trite regret, but it’ll be brought up later).

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