Author: Jim Ellwanger

Another itinerary update

I’ve added approximate driving times to the itinerary, for Levi to calculate how many times the long version of Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” can be played on each leg of the trip. Actually, since Levi has a first-generation iPod, I’m not sure how familiar he is with the concept of the “on-the-go playlist” feature of the third-generation iPods. This allows someone in the passenger seat to easily construct a playlist consisting of, for example, “Feels So Good” three times, the Beach Boys’ “Kokomo” twice, and then “Feels So Good” four more times. It would also allow someone in the driver’s seat to steer the car into a tree.

On another note, I got my brand-new passport in the mail today, so that I can more easily get into and out of Canada on this trip. My previous passport was issued in 1984, the last time I traveled outside the borders of the U.S. Why, it’s old enough that it has separate stamps for France and Belgium in it! (My mother finally dug the old one up from wherever she’d been hiding it and sent it to me, thus finally allowing me to apply for a new one.)

And they named the baby Damon

I guess I should make mention of the fact that the Boston Red Sox are the Sports Illustrated Sportsmen of the Year, which I guess makes sense, since as of now, the Sox winning is the feel-good sports story of the year. The story in Sports Illustrated is about Red Sox fans, which means it’s heartwarming and tearjerking, not to mention heartjerking and tearwarming.

The problem is with the timing, since this issue came out at the beginning of December (I guess it was tied to a TV special where they revealed the choice). What happens if, for example, Brett Favre thwarts an invasion of Earth sometime between now and the end of the year? Well, maybe now that the Sox won the World Series, it won’t matter so much if we’re enslaved by aliens.

The Motor City, etc.

I don’t think AAA would approve of staying in a hotel that has chunks of plaster all over the floor and pigeons roosting inside. But maybe I’m wrong. Their 2004 Tourbooks come out in April, so I’ll pick up the one for Michigan when I have the Triptik made and see how many “diamonds” they give the ol’ Book Cadillac.

While we’re on the subject of Detroit, just the other night, I watched an HBO documentary called “A City on Fire: The Story of the ’68 Detroit Tigers.” The part about the World Series might make Levi depressed and morose, but I enjoyed it. Our next baseball trip after this one needs to involve time travel.

It actually contained some content relevant to our National Anthem discussion: Mickey Lolich complaining about how long it took Jose Feliciano to get through “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the beginning of Game 5, and several other interviewees, including Ernie Harwell, talking about all the complaints received about this unique take on the anthem. It sounded fine to me, although they didn’t play the whole thing uninterrupted in the documentary, so I couldn’t tell exactly how long it went on for.

The birth of this blog prodded a couple of people to put their names into consideration as official hangers-on. Luke wants to go to Davenport and St. Louis, and Maura wants to join us in Pittsburgh in addition to Philadelphia, so I certainly hope she enjoys the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I have updated the itinerary with details of their attendance.

Off to a good start?

I have just added a link to our trip itinerary to the header of this blog.

Since they’re reflected in that itinerary, I might as well discuss some of the recent preparations I’ve made, because if getting there is half the fun, then preparing for the trip is the other half…

Places to stay: With the assistance of the AAA web site, I made reservations at relatively inexpensive hotels in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Pittsburgh (and the Canadian dollar better not get any stronger, so that the hotels in Toronto and Montreal stay inexpensive). Yes, the AAA web site doesn’t list every possible place to stay, but I like the assurance that a AAA inspector didn’t have a room infested with bedbugs, or however they decide on their “diamond” ratings. Anyway, the Toronto, Montreal, and Boston hotels seem to be a quick rapid transit ride away from each city’s respective stadium, and the Pittsburgh hotel is within walking distance, thanks to Hilton’s weekend specials. (I assume in this case, the AAA inspector didn’t have a room infested with the Hilton sisters.)

Unfortunately for Levi, the Skydome hotel in Toronto didn’t qualify as “relatively inexpensive,” especially the “field view” rooms. But maybe if I make it onto “Super Millionaire” in May…

Anyway, I haven’t made reservations for the Quad Cities or Detroit yet because I guess we’re not exactly sure how many hangers-on there are going to be. I have a place in mind for Detroit which looks like it’s in walking distance of Comerica Park. There seem to be plenty of choices in the Quad Cities, and I may end up deciding that perhaps we should stay in Galesburg, which is about 45 minutes south (since we have to make it to St. Louis for an afternoon game).

Driving directions: Speaking of making it to St. Louis, it turns out that the AAA web site is ill-equipped for making very complicated requests for their Triptik map packages. Each request can only have one starting point and eight destinations, and this trip is about twice that long. (Also, the request form doesn’t include the town in Pennsylvania where my aunt and uncle live.) Nevertheless, I tried making two separate requests, one starting in Chicago and going until I ran out of destinations in Philadelphia, then one starting in Philadelphia and going back to Chicago. I only ended up getting the second one, probably because the AAA computer wanted to be helpful and cancel one of my Chicago-Philadelphia routings, assuming I had quickly changed my mind about which cities I wanted to pass through on the way.

So one of these days, I’m going to show up in person at the local AAA office to challenge them and their route-highlighting skills.

Rental car: Obviously, it will be important to get unlimited mileage and be sure it’s okay to take the car into Canada. I am under the impression that the lowest car rental rates can be found at airports if you’re coming in on a flight, as I will be…but since Levi, I believe, rents cars more often than I do, perhaps he knows more than I do.

My flight: Right now, the cheapest L.A.-Chicago fare is on Spirit Airlines, but their one flight a day is a red-eye eastbound, and I hate red-eyes because I can’t sleep on planes; more importantly, a flight I took on Spirit in the summer of 1999 left me with no confidence in their ability to run an airline.

(By the way: “AAA” above is a reference to the American Automobile Association, not to minor-league baseball.)

To mark the impending Opening Day, they dug up another baseball movie over there at the Encore channel: “The Slugger’s Wife,” from 1985. This movie has everything, including the Braves’ blue-and-white uniforms, Mark Fidrych and Skip Caray as themselves, and Rebecca DeMornay and Loudon Wainwright III singing rock hits of the late ’70s and early ’80s, including (why not?) Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” Not to mention the titular slugger having a chance to break Roger Maris’s home run record on the last day of the season while his Braves need to beat the Astros to capture the N.L. East title. (Levi, I’m sure, is bristling at the merest idea that this is what actually happened in 1985.)

While I’m at it, I’ll mention that some parts of the country got a baseball-related TV Guide cover this past week: Detroit got Ivan Rodriguez, Philadelphia got Jim Thome, South Florida got Josh Beckett, Chicago got Kerry Wood and Mark Prior, Houston got Andy Pettite and Roger Clemens, and Southern California got Vladimir Guerrero. Any or all of these people could be the answer to a future trivia question, since this was the first TV Guide issue since 1954 to contain eight days of program listings. (The national cover was “Where Are They Now?”, spotlighting such long-gone television personalities as Eriq LaSalle and Gillian Anderson. The current editorial staff at TV Guide seems to believe that the public’s memory extends no longer than eight days, an opinion they share with the producers of the VH1 show “Best Week Ever.”)

Still, it’s nice to see TV Guide using baseball in an attempt to drive newsstand sales in certain areas, rather than their regular standbys of “Star Trek” or an upcoming movie.

We have a blog

Three years ago, friends of ours named Luke and Sandy went on a baseball road trip and kept a joint blog about it. So I figured we should either rip them off, or pay homage to them, depending on whether or not Luke and Sandy are going to be reading this.

This is actually the replacement for some “manual” blogging I had been doing about this trip on my own web site, so I’ve copied all those entries over to here. The advantages are that Levi can easily make entries here as well, and we can both make entries from anywhere…including while we’re on the trip, if we can beg, borrow, or steal a computer capable of connecting to the Internet at some point.

It has also been rumored that Luke may be joining us for the first portion of our road trip. I hope he can make it, even if I disagree in part with his opinions on National Anthem etiquette. While I will happily sing along to an instrumental version (especially if it’s being played live by an organist), I will remain silent if someone is out on the field performing, because I actually want to listen to their performance. But I do agree that the cheering shouldn’t start until the end of the song, no matter how good the singer is at hitting the high note.

Therefore, in case they do instrumental versions of “O Canada” in Toronto and/or Montreal, I want to be sure I have the lyrics down.

On another note, my mother tells me that my cousin is getting married in Connecticut in July. Depending on the exact wedding plans (and the exact wedding location), I may attempt to come up with a scheme to visit New York for a day, a city which is a noticeable gap on the road trip itinerary. The Yankees will be in town that weekend, right before the All-Star break, playing my hometown Devil Rays.

I realized that there may actually be a few other people in attendance at the Expos-Dodgers game, due to the presence of Quebec’s very own Eric Gagne in the visitors’ bullpen.

However, the Olympics will also be going on that week, so maybe all the locals will be staying home to cheer for the Canadians. Let’s hope there aren’t a lot of people thinking that this year’s Olympics are taking place at Olympic Stadium, despite the name, because things could get ugly.

The first tangible sign of spring

Hey, the Phillies tickets showed up in the mail already! We’ll actually be meeting up with my aunt and uncle at the game and our mutual friend Maura, so I’m going to mail those people’s tickets to them ASAP.

On another note, I bought Padres tickets over the weekend for a May game against the Cubs. This isn’t directly relevant to the road trip, except that both the Padres and the Phillies are going to be playing in new stadiums in 2004, so it’ll be fun to do a comparison and contrast. The Padres’ stadium, Petco Park, already gets points for being named after something warm and fuzzy (well, as warm and fuzzy as a chain store can be, i.e., much warmer and fuzzier than Wal-Mart), whereas the Phillies’ stadium, Citizens Bank Park, loses points for being yet another stadium named after a cold, impersonal bank. Actually, at least it’s a bank that still has “bank” in its corporate name, unlike its baseball stadium naming rights counterpart across Pennsylvania, PNC.