2005 Baseball Road Trip Part V
Houston and Atlanta

My last article left off somewhere just North of Texas on July 6th, with me getting a phone call telling me that my mom’s friend Penny Rasmussen had found a place for me to stay that night. I wrote down an address in Plano, Texas and plugged it into my GPS. I was going to stay with Scott and Karen Calder, Penny’s brother and sister-in-law. I thought that I was just getting a bed for the night, but I would be getting a whole lot more.

After driving 8 hours through Kansas, Oklahoma and part of Texas, I pulled up in front of the Calder’s house just as Scott was getting home from his job. I introduced myself and he helped me carry my stuff inside. I met Karen and as soon as I had sat down, they started asking me about the rest of my trip. They took me out to a Tex-Mex restaurant and I brought along my itinerary. Karen brought along her planner and was taking notes. She had business contacts in several of the cities that I was going to and thought that she might be able to help me out with tickets in some of the cities. After dinner, they took me out to their local minor league stadium which is home to the AA Frisco Rough Riders. The stadium was awesome and looked like a miniaturized big league field. If Reno ever gets the AAA team that has been rumored to be coming, I hope the stadium looks a lot like this one.

On the way back to the Calder’s home Karen asked if I wanted see Dealey Plaza where John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Scott immediately replied “He’s on a baseball stadium tour, not a where-Presidents-have-been-killed tour.” Needless to say, we didn’t head into Dallas. Once we got back to their home, Scott turned on the Rangers game, and I unfortunately got to see the Red Sox pick up a win. If I had known what would happen just a few weeks later in the summer, I would have tried to go to that game, but hindsight is 20-20.

I woke up on the morning of July 7th ready to make another long hot drive through Texas on my way to Houston. I was excited because I would be picking up Andy at the airport that afternoon and would be able to split the driving duties with him. Karen said that she would be in touch with me regarding the tickets and I was on my way.

I talked to Andy before he left from Reno and made sure that his plane was still on time. I got to Houston about 4 hours before his flight was supposed to land so I headed over to Minute Maid Park and bought some tickets for that night’s game. Every time that I watched an Astro’s game before I left, it seemed like the Crawford Boxes in left field had a pretty decent view and also got sprayed with a good amount of home runs. They were a little more expensive than some of the tickets that I had already bought, but I had saved some money at the other parks and decided to use the savings to get better tickets here in Houston.

After getting the tickets I went to the airport and was still 3 hours too early to pick up Andy. I had no idea what I was going to do, so I decided to go inside and took my laptop with me. While I was sitting around in the airport, a group of four or five monks all dressed up in their bright orange robes came and sat right next to me. Now, I am usually not someone who stares, but when you have a group of monks wearing neon orange robes just a few feet from you, it’s hard not to notice. As if it wasn’t strange enough for the monks to be hanging out in the airport, an Oriental woman came up and in the middle of the busy airport, got down on all fours and bowed to one of the monks. After that, she got into some sort of argument over paperwork with the monks and left. I was already tired, so my mind wasn’t completely sharp, and the whole monk thing was really weirding me out. To make it even stranger, as I was working on my laptop, some European lady came and stood about a foot from where I was sitting and stared at me for the better part of ten minutes. When I looked up to see what was going on, she continued to stare directly at me and didn’t say a word. I still wonder if I had a spider or something sitting on top of my hat because this lady just wouldn’t stop. Andy’s flight was a little bit delayed due to some nasty thunderstorms that were associated with Hurricane Dennis which was spinning out in the Gulf of Mexico. He finally arrived and I couldn’t have been happier to get out of that airport.

We parked the car and loaded up our pockets with water bottles and sunflower seeds and headed off to the stadium. At the gate we were told we would have to get rid of all of our food before we could go in. We weren’t very happy about having to toss full bags of seeds but we complied so that we could get into the stadium. The air conditioning inside felt great and was a nice change from the muggy air outside. We took a walk around the main concourse before heading out to our seats. When I sat down, I sat next to an elderly couple who were season ticket holders and struck up a conversation with them. Because neither Andy nor I have Texas accents, the man asked us where we were from and what brought us to Houston. We explained to him about our road trip and he thought that it was a great idea. He introduced us to the man sitting in front of us who was also a season ticket holder and told him about our trip. He was really interested and gave me a home run ball that he had caught during batting practice and had signed by Larry Dierker. I told him that I couldn’t accept it, but he insisted saying that he came out to almost all of the home games and that he would just get another one. I couldn’t thank him enough and he put just one condition on giving me the ball. He wanted to make sure that I made it to all 30 stadiums for him. He said he had always wanted to do something like what we were doing but never had the chance. So, Mr. Le, if you’re out there and you’re reading this, I made it and thanks for the ball.

I talked to the guy next to me some more and found out that I might have bought some of the best seats in the house. I was talking to him about his season tickets and where he had them in the previous years and he said that he and his wife had picked their current seats because they were bigger than the seats elsewhere in the park. Apparently only a few rows had bigger seats, so it was tough to get them. Overall, I was thoroughly pleased with my ticket selection and this was just another reason to like the Crawford boxes. The only downside to these seats is that you can’t see the warning track and part of left field directly below you because you are so elevated. You do have a clear view of the hill and flagpoles in centerfield though which can always change the shape of a game. I don’t know of too many other stadiums where the actual features of the field can have an impact on the players.

The game got started with some instant offense as the Astro’s starter Wandy Rodriguez walked the Padre’s leadoff hitter, Dave Roberts. He took second on a wild pitch and scored on a double by the next hitter. The next couple of innings weren’t very exciting except for a great play by Rodriguez on a come-backer in the third to end the inning. Craig Biggio hit a home run in the 4th to get Houston tied back up but in the fifth the Padres broke through for 6 runs to go up 7 to 1. The rest of the game the Astros tried to mount a comeback but never quite made it as they lost 7-5. We had a couple of home runs hit near us including Biggio’s, but nothing close enough to try to make a play on.

After the game Andy and I headed out towards Louisiana planning on being in Atlanta for a game the next night. It was a solid fourteen hours of driving, but with the two of us, I figured we’d be able to do it if we took turns driving and sleeping. We stopped for gas on the outskirts of Houston and also decided to get some food. I went for some beef stew and Andy decided to heat up a cup of noodles. As soon as I got all set to eat though, I realized that I had forgotten to bring a can opener. I went inside to ask the station attendant if they had one that I could borrow and he said no. I somehow managed to use a bottle opener to get the can open, but I would pay for it when I went to eat it as I had some metal splinters fall in. We used the stations microwave while we were waiting for our gas to pump and the whole time that we were in there we could see the guy behind the counter getting more and more agitated. We didn’t see what the big deal was since we weren’t making a mess and weren’t bothering him, but he apparently had a problem with us being there. We went outside with our food and ate using the trunk as a table. The guy from inside continued pacing back and forth and watching to see what we were doing. As we stood there eating, another person came up to pump some gas and when she went inside to pay, the attendant said something about us to her and pointed out at us. She nodded her head in agreement and he picked up the phone. Thinking that he was calling the police on us for loitering, we decided it would probably be best to hurry up and get out of there. We were laughing as we pulled away. Some people can just be way too uptight.

I drove until around midnight before my contacts started drying up and then drove for another couple of hours after switching to glasses. I think Andy took over for a little while and we ended up stopping at a rest stop just east of Baton Rouge around 4 in the morning. We still had around 8 hours to go to make it to Atlanta but decided to try to get some sleep. The car was extremely hot and humid and I got a couple of hours of sleep. At around 6:30 though, I found that I couldn’t go back to sleep and decided to get back on the road. Andy and I switched off driving in shifts for the rest of the morning until we hit Bessemer, Alabama. We pulled off to get some gas and as I started to pull out of the gas station, the car died. I couldn’t believe it. We had been making great time and were just a few hours away from Atlanta. Fortunately, the people here were very nice and we got a jump from a pickup almost as soon as we opened the hood. We went to the nearest garage which happened to be a Texaco station that did oil changes and were told that we needed a new battery. We had a hard time understanding them through their thick Southern accents but we finally figured out that they wanted to charge us $100 and we told them to forget it. We looked up an actual garage in the phone book and got them to give us a tow. They did a more thorough check of the electrical system and decided that it was my alternator that needed replacement. I was stressing out the whole time that we were there about maybe missing the game in Atlanta and facing the possibility of having my car bust down on the opposite side of the country from home. We were told that the alternator might have gone out because of having my radar detector and the GPS system plugged in at the same time. The mechanic told us that having one of them plugged in would probably be safe so we decided that we would go with the GPS, because we’d rather know where we’re going than worry about picking up police cars. The mechanic understood that time was important to us and got us out as quick as he could. We were $400 down but back on the road and the mechanics at the garage gave us some tips on where we would be safe to speed and where the highway patrolmen liked to hang out. I used their tips well as I cut an hour off of the estimated drive time from the GPS.

We made it to Atlanta with enough time to hunt for a parking spot and get into the stadium with some time to kill before the game. For a ballpark that wasn’t originally designed for baseball but rather an Olympic venue, the Braves had done a nice job renovating it to suit their needs. We were happy to stay in the upper deck for the entire game as the view wasn’t bad at all and we were able to move from our spot in the outfield to a spot on the infield. We were looking out directly over first base towards second and could see the entire field. In the second inning, our section got a whole lot rowdier when a group of about 20 college age people showed up wearing matching shirts. On the front they said “We Got Cox,” referring to Braves manager Bobby Cox, and the back read “13 Long and Still Going Strong,” in reference to the Braves 13 straight division titles. They were into the game the whole night and they made doing the tomahawk chop a lot more fun. The tomahawk chop is the coolest cheer in all of baseball and it definitely gets thorough use at Turner Field. The game was excellent as the Braves won on a walk-off single in the bottom of the 9th. The stadium was rocking the entire night and exploded after the Braves finished off the 3-2 win over the Brewers.

After the game as we were heading down the ramps to get out, somebody saw my Notre Dame t-shirt and declared me “The second smartest man in the state of Atlanta.” Andy and I both started laughing and the guy started talking to me about Notre Dame football. He apparently had declared himself the smartest man in the state of Atlanta (Yes, he actually was so drunk that he apparently thought that Atlanta was now its own state), due to the fact that he was also a Notre Dame fan.

We made it back to the car without any more interruptions and headed south towards Tampa Bay. We spent the night in a campsite somewhere in South Georgia and got some sleep. It was really loud in the campsite because of all the bugs in the air but I was so tired that I fell asleep almost immediately.

With 11 stadiums down and just 19 more to go, we were starting to worry about more than the electrical system of the car though as we were heading straight into Florida in the midst of Hurricane Dennis. Although Dennis was clearly not the biggest hurricane of the year for the Gulf region, it was still pretty awe-inspiring for a couple of guys from Nevada who had only seen news clips of them. That’s all coming next time as we try to battle mother nature to watch two baseball games in rain-soaked Florida.

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