If absence makes the heart grow fonder, there was no way I wasn’t going to be head over heels for finally making it to Spring Training in Arizona. Thanks to the pandemic, my baseball nerd dreams of lounging in the Arizona sun watching baseball got shelved in 2020 and it took until last week to finally make that trip. It was a trip that, truthfully, I’ve wanted to take for a much longer time.

The hook for the trip was spring training baseball – small stadiums, lazy afternoons and getting a close up view of the game I love so much. This year, as scheduling luck would have it, the World Baseball Classic was happening with a round of games in downtown Phoenix at the Diamondbacks stadium. I got the schedules for all of those games, a map, and got to work planning out the kind of visit my baseball loving heart has always dreamed of.

Over the course of the week I made it to five games, did some craft brewery hopping, and even managed a road trip up to Sedona to hike and take in the spectacular scenery and be stunned by some amazing Arizona wine…. yes, wine! I met some interesting people along the way – a man and his father from Montreal who chatted with me in French about our beloved Expos, a guy from Baltimore doing almost the exact same trip as me chatting over a beer before an Angels-Mariners game, a woman originally from Mexico who cooks at her family restaurant outside Sedona whose food was, as she let me know, just what she used to cook for her husband back home. Like all trips, you never know what memories or moments are going to stick when you are back home. For me, it was those conversations, the rugged beauty of Arizona and just the uplifting sense of being in all those ballparks, watching a game I love… a game that for some reason touches me in a profound way.

Like many from Saskatchewan before me, this might have been the start of an annual tradition.