Labor Day Extravaganza - Baseball Road Trip

What does 3 crazy girls, 4 days, 4 airports, 4 baseball games, and 750 miles in a Dodge Caravan minivan sound like to you? Maybe not quite the same thing it does to me ... the perfect recipe for an awesome Labor Day weekend, of course!

About two months ago I noticed that the Braves were playing in St. Louis at the end of August - a stadium which I had yet to visit. I actually thought about making a road trip and going to the game. Then, out of curiosity, I checked to see if any of the other midwestern teams were in town over Labor Day. Much to my surprise, they were - and that is where the idea began. Of course, I never thought I'd be able to convince anyone to go with me, but I didn't have to do much convincing, and the plan that I thought was just another wild idea of mine actually started to become a reality.

The goal of this trip was twofold: first and foremost, to make it to 3 more stadiums I hadn't hit yet. A close second, was to be able to say that I went to a game every month of this baseball season (not counting October). Well, I'm back now and I can officially say mission accomplished!

Yeah, that's right, on Friday morning, Jenny, Sharyn, and I departed for our Labor Day baseball road trip. We flew into Minneapolis, and then over the next few days made our way to St. Louis, via Milwaukee and Chicago. It was certainly a trip never to be forgotten ... I'm going to have to break this one up into separate postings, just to keep things easy.

Key ingredients to the fun included (in no particular order):

* Cheap hotels thanks to Priceline, Hotwire, and Marriott Friends & Family.
* Baseball tickets (thanks to Craigslist, Tickets.com, and Ticketmaster.com).
* Wild and crazy baseball fans in every ballpark - the one good thing about beer.
* Borders & Barnes & Noble to feed my new addiction to the latest series of books I finally caved into reading (more on that later).
* Garmin Nuvi GPS (which I have nicknamed my "BFF Jill" thanks to the Cingular commercial)
* Ipod car adapter (thanks to Jenny).
* Dodge Caravan. Yes, you read correctly. A minivan.
* Portable dvd players.
* Camera.

When we were planning the trip, we decided that we would do one baseball game per city (including my idea to take at least one picture of a crazy/wild/weirdly dressed fan at each game - which proved very easy), as well as one state-specific attraction, event, etc. It wasn't hard to plan what those things were going to be. We knew it was a crazy idea, but we also knew that it would be a lot of fun. What we didn't know was exactly what how our ideas of what the trip would entail would actually compare to the reality of what the trip materialized into ...