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It\u2019s 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\u2019t have the opportunity to write when I got back.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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\u00a0minor league<\/em>\u00a0ballparks, which we both tend to agree are more rewarding, and frankly more economically efficient.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the time we traveled, we visited ballparks in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse.\u00a0 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\u2019ll get back to that in a little bit.<\/span><\/p>\n But overall, the trip went well, I think.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/span><\/p>\n The one key thing my phone contributed towards was the finding of lodging.\u00a0 See, we had gone into this trip with pretty much zero preparation with where we were going to stay.\u00a0 In prior years, we had kind of left things to chance, and since we\u2019re both pretty simple salt-of-the-earth kind of guys, glitz and luxury really aren\u2019t 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<\/em>).\u00a0 In the past, we\u2019ve relied on chance and the game of chance, known as staying at whatever roadside hovels were the cheapest and available.\u00a0 We have named such places as \u201cKingdom Cities\u201d based on a particularly\u00a0charming<\/em>\u00a0Red Roof Inn we had stayed in, located in Kingdom City, Missouri.<\/span><\/p>\n Apparently, the world doesn\u2019t really work in this way anymore, and randomly seeking out Kingdom Cities doesn\u2019t appear to be the most efficient way of finding spontaneous lodging anymore.\u00a0 On this trip, I discovered the wonders of Hotwire.com, and essentially found four nights of lodging for roughly around $100 a person.\u00a0 Because companies like Hotwire buy up all of the empty rooms in advance and float it to last second travelers like us, it\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n And amazingly, they\u2019re not all shithole hovels too.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And everyone who worked there was young and mostly attractive females, surprisingly.\u00a0 Syracuse and Harrisburg also weren\u2019t bad either, but most importantly, neither joint was ever over $68 a night between two people.\u00a0 I think I\u2019m pretty sold on Hotwire whenever it comes to spontaneous travel again in the future, or if I ever get stranded overnight anywhere again.<\/span><\/p>\n Although baseball was the objective of the trip, these trips are always so much more than just the baseball games we watch.\u00a0 It\u2019s about the journey, and seeing new places and experiencing new things and trying new food and drinking local brews.\u00a0 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\u2019s a very eerie similarities to why\u00a0Left 4 Dead<\/em>\u00a0seemed to take place in the Allegheny region of that part of the state.<\/span><\/p>\n Also, it was my na\u00efve impression that Wawa owned the entire state of Pennsylvania, but apparently, somewhere in the middle is a very defined line where it\u2019s clear that Wawa territory ends, and it\u2019s solely Sheetz territory.\u00a0 Why does PA seem to have the stronghold on two of the most cult-loved gas\/convenience stores on the east coast?<\/span><\/p>\n As for the cities themselves, I would have to go ahead and rate them as such:<\/span><\/p>\n I just want to make sure that there\u2019s a distinct difference when it comes to Syracuse and Buffalo in comparison to places like Rochester and Auburn.\u00a0 Neither Syracuse or Buffalo were at all that impressive, and to their credit we didn\u2019t 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.<\/span><\/p>\n Rochester was at least a city with character, history, and plenty of things to do, and plenty of places to eat.\u00a0 The ballpark was the best among the three upstate ballparks, and there weren\u2019t that many instances of not having something to do.\u00a0 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\u2019t realize that it\u2019s not the 1980s anymore, as well as a beautiful drive through wine and orchard country to get there.<\/span><\/p>\n As for Syracuse, I\u2019m baffled how my sister was able to live there for four years while going to college up there, because it\u2019s a dreadfully boring city with pretty much nothing to do.\u00a0 Even for the college students, there didn\u2019t appear to be a whole lot going on around the college itself, and there wasn\u2019t really that much going on around the slightly off-proximity either.\u00a0 Not to mention that it gets cold like in September and doesn\u2019t necessarily relent until around May, from what I understand.\u00a0 I dig cool weather and all, but even I\u2019d begin to get cabin fever from being in a place like Syracuse.<\/span><\/p>\n Buffalo is a place I\u2019ve been to a few times actually, and it\u2019s nothing that impressive to me.\u00a0 Aside from visiting the place where the buffalo wing was purportedly invented, the Anchor Bar, there\u2019s really not a whole lot else I liked about the place.\u00a0 It\u2019s kind of a tourist place that tries to impress Canadians into crossing the border, and the fact that they\u2019re close to Niagara Falls makes them kind of inflate everything else to capitalize on the tourism aspect of visitors.\u00a0 Overall, I\u2019m not impressed, and there was a reason why we left Buffalo and went straight to Rochester instead of staying there overnight.<\/span><\/p>\n As I mentioned before, we were rained out of our game in Auburn, which was the second time that I\u2019ve ever been rained out on a trip.\u00a0 The first time also happened a few weeks ago, and both would mark that out of all the years I\u2019ve done baseball trips, these are the first times that rain has played into the outcome of the games.\u00a0 I know it\u2019s silly to be mad at the weather, as it\u2019s truly something that we cannot control, but 2013 has been a pretty rainy year outright, and frankly, I think we\u2019re all kind of exasperated with the rain in general.<\/span><\/p>\n The ballparks themselves, I\u2019ll 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.<\/span><\/p>\n As for the trip in its entirety, it was definitely a good one.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t do the barbecue game were important experiences that good to know in the future.\u00a0 And walking onto beautiful waterfronts, surrounded by gigantic lakes and vast expanses of nothing or nature, needing me to remind myself that I\u2019m actually in the state of New York; a state that\u2019s so associated with the city, which actually makes up barely 1\/75th<\/sup>\u00a0of the entire state, but manages to dominate the entire perception of the state as a whole, to realize that there\u2019s way so much more than a dingy overrated city that makes up what actually is a pretty beautiful state outside of it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s 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\u2019t have the opportunity to write when I … Continue reading (Upstate) New York state of mind<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[88,62,64,83,15,65],"class_list":["post-37363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-ballparks","tag-baseball","tag-minor-leagues","tag-observations","tag-og","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37363"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37365,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37363\/revisions\/37365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n