Following our time in Chicago, we finished our trip by heading up north the Minneapolis and then making our way back home to West Virginia from there. With this, we experienced our first Blue Jays game of the season (my favorite team) and some of the worst days of our trips. I did learn that planning to camp, even at the end of May, up north always comes with the price of potential freezing.
Minnesota Twins
We arrived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in time to set up camp and plan our route for our first full day in the area, which would take us to the Mall of America for some exploration. We were quite disappointed in the visual representation of the downfall of malls once there, but we did enjoy ourselves with the rollercoasters, Lego store, Peeps store, and Ross’s first experience with Bubba Gump’s!
The next day we made no plans other than the 7pm ballgame, so we took our time making it into town. Unfortunately, our plan to just mosey around town until game time was literally rained on. While we still took in the sights, being sure to walk out to the U.S. Bank Stadium construction (home of the Minnesota Vikings) and catching some time with the Mississippi River, we actually did some bar hopping and ran into other baseball fans.
Minneapolis and my best friend would introduce me to poutine, which we would eat even more of in Canada a few weeks later, and I would grow to have an affinity for. We headed to the ballpark around the times gate opened and were reminded of the reason we often don’t take in sporting events together: we were greeted by a rain delay. My best friend and I are notorious for bad luck at sporting events, to the point that we actively did not attend the best season of college football our university’s team had seen in decades so that they could possibly pull of a perfect season (They would lose in their final game 66-67 in double overtime, but it was a wild season!)
The game did eventually get underway, though. And, while we froze on the top row of the ballpark, where the rain and wind constantly hit us. We got to watch 5 innings of baseball where the Blue Jays won and the game got called as a full game. On our train ride back to camp, we met some lovely, fellow Blue Jays fans and had some great conversations about how a person from West Virginia even becomes a Toronto Blue Jays fan.
Milwaukee Brewers
We experienced yet another cold day in Milwaukee as we went to catch the Brewers at Miller Park, but were thankful for an enclosed stadium. After several successful entrances to other ballparks, I did finally end up having my pepper spray confiscated here. (I took up carrying pepper spray that summer instead of my usual pocket knife to make access to games easier, but ventilation systems in enclosed stadiums have different rules.)
The Brewers game was, to this day, the weirdest game I’ve ever been to, only because it was the longest game I’ve ever attended. Ross discovered, and was quite put out, that concessions close during the ninth inning even if it is obvious the game will go into extra innings. We both discovered that the Milwaukee Brewers have a tendency to go for long games, as they were a part of the longest MLB game played in modern ball, with 25 innings being played over 2 days in 1984. In fact, the 1984 game actually ended in a tie after all that work.
We would only make it to 19 innings and it would be won by a walkoff by the Brewers, but, by that point, we just wanted the game to actually be the longest recorded, or to just end already. We had no horse in the race, as the Brewers were playing the Diamondbacks, and our travels were starting to catch up with us. To satisfy his hunger, we ended up eating at a restaurant in the stadium instead of finding somewhere else, and got to watch the ground crews in maintenance mode while we ate. We, sadly, ended that day sleeping in my car, because it got too cold to stay in my tent.
Cincinnati Reds
Originally, I had thought that I went to Great American Ballpark in 2015, but I was mistaken. I did try to get shots of it as we drove through the area on my way back home, but they didn’t turn out. I would return to CIncinnati for the All-Star game that year, but I would only be working at FanFest, as I can’t afford tickets like those.
Still, one of my favorite baseball games took place at Great American. It was 2014 and it was the first time I had seen the Blue Jays play in-person since the first time I saw them in Toronto in 2006. After the second inning, I was a bit down, as the Blue Jays were losing 9-0 to the home team. But, I got to see an amazing thing that reminds me why the Blue Jays should never be counted out. The Jays tied the game in the top of the ninth and took it to the tenth, where they were capable of pulling out a win 14-9. It still, to this day, brought me one of my favorite ballpark pictures and baseball game memories.
Raven K 