Baseball Trip Replay - Day 8 - May 31, 1994

May 31 - Well, I think we ran out of things to talk about. However, I had to figure out how to ship this antique radio (it's in a cabinet 42" high) back home. Grandmother's phone was acting up also. I arranged the shipping from a pay phone, and called the phone company to look at the problem.

When I was preparing for this trip, I had tried to find a knee-length raincoat with a hood since I am expecting rain to happen somewhere this summer. I first went to Sears, and then Target, but they said that raincoats were "seasonal" in California. I went to North Face, an outdoor shop, and they didn't have what I wanted, and what they did have, they wanted $70 for. When I told Grandmother this, we went down to Wal-Mart in Plainview and found one for $15. Stupid California.

Grandmother and Me

Zenith Model 9-S-262 from 1938. It worked when I brought it home from Grandmother's in 1981. She then took it back and stored it when I went to college. Did not work in 1994. I sent it to California. Never got it fixed. Sold to collector in 2006.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 7 - May 30, 1994

May 30 - Memorial Day - Grandmother and I talked all day. I tried to dial into the net, but Grandmother has a phone which doesn't work with TouchTone, and Sprint needs TouchTone for phone cards, and my computer doesn't have an output for the phone, only an input for the line into the modem. Sigh.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 6 - May 29, 1994

May 29 - Mrs. Carey woke me up with an omelette already cooked for me. After thanking them profusely, I set out for Plainview. I was dreading this a bit because I know how boring driving in the Panhandle can be. New Mexico was dull; however, they had been getting lots of rain in West Texas recently, so all the grass and crops were green and there were lots of colorful flowers
along the highway.

I got into Plainview about 4:00, and Grandmother proceeded to stuff me full of food. My step-grandfather, Roy, is really getting old. He is quite deaf, so he has trouble keeping up with conversations, and he has circulation problems in his legs, so he has to sit in his recliner with his feet up. He sits and reads the paper most of the time.

Grandmother and I "visited" until bedtime.

Route: US 285 North to US 70 (Roswell). US 70 East to Plainview.

Hmm. Apparently my route was sub-optimal. At least I didn't go through Lubbock.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 5 - May 28, 1994

May 28 - I got off to a late start, but then packed up and headed for Carlsbad, NM. After a long, really dull drive, I arrived about 8:30 PM. There was some scenery; I went through Guadalupe Mountains National Park. There were some really cool mountains, but it was so small.

I stayed with Martha Carey's parents in Carlsbad. Martha's sister was playing a recital that evening, so they weren't home when I got there. They just left the front door open for me. Wow.

Mrs. Carey left me microwave dinner, and I nuked some lasagna and watched tv. After I got bored with that, I went to the piano room. They have two grand pianos and a pipe organ in one half of the living room. I started messing around with some Mozart which I have no hope of playing. They got back, and we got to know each other.

Turns out they have a PC and an HP Laser Jet IIP printer with 512K, and they are having printing problems in Windows (suprise, suprise). I explained to them why and the best way to fix it, and Mr. Carey said, "I think you have earned your keep!"

Route: I-10 East to US-62-180 (in El Paso). US-62-180 East to Carlsbad.

Baseball Trip Replay - Day 4 - May 27, 1994

May 27 - Bobb and I went to the Tucson Sonora Desert Museum, and had a blast. This place has lots of plants and animals from the desert. It has lots of different species of cactus, with an entire display devoted to the Saguaro. There was an aviary, a special hummingbird aviary, a display of
desert cats, a prairie dog town, some coyotes, foxes, etc. It was a neat place, and the cafeteria has good food.

Bobb then drove me to the Kitt Peak Observatory, which has lots of cool telescopes and a killer view.

We picked Nancy up from work, and had dinner at a place serving Middle Eastern food; I had a wonderful chicken kabob with rice and vegetables.

We then all went to the Tucson-Salt Lake City baseball game. I had never been to a minor league game before; I think I still prefer the majors. Don't get me wrong; I had a great time. Nancy, who had never enjoyed going to a game before, really liked it a lot. Was a wild game; there were five errors, including one on a botched rundown play, three more rundowns, three wild-pitches
and two passed balls. Tucson won on a double in the bottom of the eighth, 8-7.

No internet information about minor league games from 1994.

Baseball Trip day 3 - May 26, 1994

May 26 - Checked out in the morning, and headed for Tuscon. Almost got stopped on I-8 for doing 62 in a 55. The road was downhill, and I was passing somebody, and someone else was, too. The person behind me got stopped.

I left the fog in San Diego. It was quite hot just over the mountains. The land is fairly desolate, but there are actually quite a few plants to look at, and there are lots of mountains. So the drive wasn't too bad.

Well, take that back. Both sides of Yuma for 75 miles or so are really quite dull (not as dull as some of the stuff later in the trip, however). My favorite spot on this drive was the "rest area" on California side of the border. It consisted of a big patch of dirt with two picnic tables, a pay
phone, and two porta-potties. Wow, what a place.

I got into Tucson about 5, and found Bobb Head's and Nancy Nelson's house without any trouble. I settled in, and Bobb, Nancy and I went out for (wait for it), Mexican food! (In Arizona? What a surprise!). Bobb had a Morris dance rehearsal at his house, and Nancy had to go out an try to attract bugs with a black light since it had rained the night before. (She is a graduate student
in entomology at ASU). This is not a usual occurrence in late May.

Route to Tucson: I-805 South to Cal-163 East. 163 East to I-8 East. I-8 East to I-10 East. I-10 East to Tucson.

Baseball Trip day 2 - May 25, 1994

May 25 - Woke up at 5:56 AM to find the room shaking from an aftershock to the January Northridge Quake. Couldn't get back to sleep, so read a little while. Got checked out about 9, and headed to San Diego.

Checked into the TravelLodge, and took a one-hour nap. Went and visited Anna's aunt and uncle, Linda and Fred. Talked with them a while, and went to the game.

Jack Murphy Stadium is really ugly from the outside. It looks like several praying mantis' atacking a giant doughnut. But the inside is nice.

I got really good seats, which is not too big a surprise, since the owners have done their best to alienate the fans. I was about ten rows back right behind home plate.

They closed the upper deck, and put tarps with all of the team logos on them on the seats. Looks kind of cool. All of the hawkers wear pin-striped baseball uniforms with the word "HAWKERS" on their chest. They were cool. The weather was still nippy with fog; I was hoping to have left that behind in the Bay Area.

The Giants beat the Padres 5-1 (I wrote this down wrong in 1994; it was actually 5-2.)

Route: I-110 to I-710 South. I-710 South to I-405 South. I-405 to I-5 South. I-5 South to I-805 South into town.

Game Link: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1994/B05250SDN1994.htm

Note that I forgot to bring my clipboard into the stadium. I did have my little travel notebook, so this in how I kept score.

Baseball trip day 1 - May 24, 1994

May 24 - Took Anna to work, ran a couple of errands and headed out. Arrived in LA about 5:30, got checked into a cheap motel in KoreaTown, and headed to the game. Parked in the worst possible location; had to walk around the stadium and up a hellish number of stairs. Got into the stadium and then was informed that no video cameras were allowed. Checked mine with lost and found, and found my seat. My seat was in the front row of the top deck, and I felt like I was falling the whole game. It was a Candlestick-like night, although not really that cold. But there was a lot of fog. Aside from the annoyance of the video camera and the rail that blocked my view of the field, I liked Dodger Stadium. Grass, build for baseball only, etc. The DiamondVision screen had an incredible picture, the best I have ever seen.

The Cubs beat the Dodgers, 2-0. (https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1994/B05240LAN1994.htm)

I was really surprised that it only took me fifteen minutes to get back to the motel.

Route from San Fransisco (where my last errand was): I-580 East to I-5. I-5 South to I-110. I-110 to city streets for KoreaTown.




(Please note that these maps are just for show; they may or may not represent the route I actually took).

Dodger Stadium

Scoresheet from game

Baseball trip replay

When I was growing up watching baseball in Houston in the late 70s, early 80s, they used to advertise from places like Wrigley Field or Dodger Stadium for travel packages to those cities to see the Astros play. That sounded so cool to me, but I really wanted to see the other stadia as well. Plus, we never got to see American League stadia on TV, except for the All-Star Game, playoffs, and World Series, because we were a "National League" city, so the NBC Game of the Week had an awful lot of Mets, Cubs, Dodgers, and Cardinals games.

I wanted to see them all.

When I started working in the real world, I got a job at Claris, an Apple subsidiary. At the time, Apple was giving paid sabbaticals; you could take six weeks paid plus whatever your vacation time you had accumulated after you had worked there for five years.

My first idea for my sabbatical was to go to Leningrad for several weeks and study Russian, but when the Soviet Union broke apart in 1992, all of the agencies I had been looking at stopped existing.

So I decided to do a baseball tour. I wrote a computer program (the current version of that is on github; the original was in C) to help me with routing since it is a variation of a hard computer science problem called the Travelling Salesman Problem. Claris had been loaned an RS 6000 machine since it was the initial way a developer could port applications from the MC68000 architecture to the Power PC architecture. However, it was sitting unused because those porting efforts moved back to the Mac. So I borrowed it. I input distances and schedules for teams for the 1994 season, ran the program for a week, when it spit out an answer, and got tickets.

That in an of itself was fun. I had to call each ticket office on the phone. I did discover that about 13 of the 24 teams I needed to call (I went to the two Bay Area stadia separately before the trip started) used Ticketmaster, but the rest each had their own way off processing. When I called the Detroit Tigers ticket office (in January), I had to call M-F 9-5 Eastern, and when I got somebody, he took my credit card info over the phone, went over to a drawer with all of the tickets for that game in it, took out mine, and dropped them in the mail.

I then set out and drove for 11 weeks. 20000 miles. Oh, and my ex-wife and I found a house we wanted the Sunday before I left, so I was also trying to manage my part of that process while on the road. Using telephone and dial-up internet. For email. No websites yet.

It was a blast. It was long. And some things in my world changed during the 3 months I was gone.

Starting tomorrow, May 24, 2020, the 26th anniversary of the first day of this trip, I am going to repost my blog entries I wrote at the time. They are generally pretty short. I will also include links to games, and other sites I saw. May not have many pictures, but I will try (I did not have a good camera).

Once it is all done, I will wrap it up with a entry about the trip, how the world changed during the summer, how baseball and world has changed since, and some other stuff.

I may not post everyday, but I will catch up if I have to miss a couple here and there.