Buckle up folks, this could be the roadiest road trip we’ve ever taken!
We’re calling it the Big East Circle Tour. If everything goes as planned (it always does, right?) this will be a 41-day, 6,000-mile extravaganza that will take us from San Antonio, to Chicago, to Maine, to Washington DC, and back to San Antonio, via Atlanta and the Deep South.
Along the way we’re planning to visit more than two dozen new (to us) National Park sites, numerous friends and family, attend a baby shower and a wedding, and take in nearly a dozen major or minor league baseball games.
Sure, with $4 per gallon gasoline and Covid cases spiking in the northeast, some might say the Big East Circle Tour is certifiably crazy; but we’re vaxed to the max, gasoline prices may have peaked, and it sounds like fun, right?
Obviously, on a trip like this, we won’t have time to be posting periodic trip reports. However, after we get back home in June, we hope to post what will undoubtedly be a long, and hopefully interesting, accounting of our travels. No doubt there will be lots of photos of Betsy with baseball team mascots.
Speaking of which, as previously mentioned, baseball games and National Park sites will be a major focus of the Big East Circle Tour; thus, some background on those two aspects of our trip might be helpful.
Most of the baseball games that we hope to attend on this trip will be AAA or AA minor league games in places like Nashville TN, Buffalo NY, Rochester NY, Portland ME, Scranton PA, and Montgomery AL. But we may also squeeze in a Class A Columbia (S.C.) Fireflies game and, possibly, even a Frederick (MD) Keys game. The Keys (named for Francis Scott) play in the MLB Draft League, which is designed for college players to demonstrate their skills for pro scouts while playing with wooden bats. In other words, it’s as low as you can go in the minor leagues.
Over the years we’ve been to a lot of minor league games in a lot of different places. I’d guess we’ve been to 40-plus minor league ballparks, ranging from the very lowest levels (like college players using wooden bats) to the highest level (AAA).
(Un?)fortunately we have not kept track of the exact numbers.
We do, however, keep close tabs on our visits to Major League baseball stadiums. There are currently 30 Major League teams and we have been to at least one home game of each of those teams in the city where they play.
However, as everyone probably knows, the billionaire owners of Major League baseball teams are very adept at getting cities to build new stadiums for their teams, so the billionaires can make more billions. And, occasionally, the leagues expand, so that there are more teams for more billionaires to own, and more stadiums for taxpayers to build for those teams to play in. Also, every now and then, a team from one city will decamp for another city.[ii]
Suffice to say, the MLB stadium numbers are not static. Thus, it is currently the case that neither of us have been to an MLB game in all the stadiums where the 30 teams currently play. Betsy has been to games in 29 of those 30 stadiums and I’ve been to 28. In fact, those numbers are freshly updated thanks to a short trip we took last week to watch the Houston Astros play the Texas Rangers in Globe Life Field in Arlington, TX; MLB’s newest stadium which opened in 2020.
With Globe Life Field now in the bag, the one stadium that Betsy is missing is the home of the Atlanta Braves, Truist Field "in" Smyrna, GA, which opened in 2017. I have not been to Truist either, so we hope to rectify that deficiency on the tail end of this trip. That will bring Betsy’s total to 30 out of 30, but I’ll still be one short, because I have not been to Petco Park in San Diego, which opened in 2004.
Assuming that we make it to the Braves game at Truist Field, Betsy’s total major league stadium count will rise to 46 and mine will be 47[iii].
Keeping track of National Park “units” is a lot more complicated than baseball stadiums, in no small part because there are more than 400 NPS units, and presidents and congresses occasionally add more.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, there are currently 423 active NPS units[iv] and I’ve “been to” 299 while Betsy has “been to” 272.
We could have a long, deep discussion about the term “been to”, but suffice to say it ranges from quick stops to read an interpretive sign in some parks, to in-depth, multi-trip explorations of other parks. On this trip it’s possible that we’ll visit more than 25 NPS “units” some of which I have “been to”, but Betsy has not. Thus, the gap in our respective totals will be shrinking.
I hope to bag my 300th NPS unit when we visit the Big South Fork National Recreation Area on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. We’ll be hiking 1.5 miles to the Charit Creek Lodge, which provides rustic accommodations, hot meals and (most importantly) cold beer with which to toast my milestone!
Hopefully this attempt at 300 will work out better than my first try. We drove from Colorado to northern Arizona last fall to visit the Rainbow Bridge National Monument on Lake Powell only to be informed at the ticket counter that the boat that would take us to the park had “engine trouble” and the trip had been canceled.
The thrill of bagging my 300th NPS unit notwithstanding, the crown jewel of our park visits on this trip will be Acadia National Park on the Maine coast, one of America’s oldest, most-visited and most-beloved national parks. We’ll be spending four nights in Bar Harbor, ME, a touristy but quaint coastal town that is surrounded by the park.
There will also be plenty of obscure and off-the-beaten-path NPS stops, like the Martin Van Buren National Historic Site in New York and Prince William Forest Park in Virginia. Roughly a fourth of our NPS visits on this trip will be Civil War battlefields.
After a few years of researching her book on
women’s athletics, one of the park units that Betsy is most looking forward to
is the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY. She's also keenly interested in checking out the women that have been enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA, which we also hope to visit.
In a nutshell, that’s the plan. In a month or so, we’ll let you know how it went.
Wish us luck on this trip…we’re gonna need it!
[ii] For the time being, to keep things from getting too confusing, let’s ignore the fact that the Los Angeles Angels play in Anaheim, the Kansas City Royals play in Independence, the Atlanta Braves play in an unincorporated area near Smyrna, etc.
[iii] We’ve both “been to” numerous now-defunct stadiums, like Turner Field in Atlanta, the Metrodome in Minneapolis, Tiger Stadium in Detroit, etc. My lead in total stadiums stems from the fact that I have been to games in three now-defunct stadiums (Municipal Stadium in Kansas City, Municipal Stadium in Baltimore, and Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta) that Betsy has not been to; while Betsy has been to one now-defunct stadium (Buff Stadium in Houston) that I have not been to.
[iv] If you’re a glutton for punishment and want to take a deep dive into the arcaneness of NPS units, have at it https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/national-park-system.htm.
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