Somewhere along the way of being a baseball fan and someone who loves to travel I had visited enough ballparks that it seemed like an interesting quest to watch a game in each major league city’s stadium. While I’ve knocked off most of the sexy places (Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, New York….) I’m left with some locations that I otherwise may not actively choose to visit. Last summer, the intersection of my work schedule, the ballparks remaining and the baseball schedule pushed me toward a trip to Detroit and then onto Cleveland.

The more I travel the more I learn that everywhere is a great spot to visit. Like in this moment… the first night on landing in Detroit and after hastily dropping my bags at the hotel, I was sitting in another new to me ballpark with a cold beer in my hand waiting for the first pitch of three games. While the destination of Detroit may not have immediately excited me, this experience did, and it never gets old.

About two and a half hours later, through an exciting back and forth game, I got to watch this game conclude with the best closer in baseball facing one of the great all-time hitters to ever play the game. A really cool moment for the baseball nerd inside me.

The next night back at the Comerica Park and I chose a cheaper upper deck seat. It gave me this awe inspiring view of a violent storm that delayed the game by about an hour. While the game on the field this night was a blowout, I got to watch that storm slowly float over the Detroit River and past Windsor for the entirety of the ballgame.

The time between games is where the city grew on me. It helps when there is outstanding craft beer in walking distance and Batch Brewing Company in the Corktown neighbourhood was a perfect place to enjoy a book, some on and off conversations and a couple of really solid takes on two of my favourite beer styles – a Czech pilsner (2nd from right) and a British bitter (far right).

Another thing that pushed me in the direction of loving Detroit was Eastern Market Brewery. They open at 10am on Saturday. Here I am sampling their delicious beers at approximately 10:03am. I find that it is important to get a jump on your beer tasting day.

And lastly for my beer explorations, I took an Uber to the slightly out of the way Brewery Faisan. Their Belgian-inspired beers were all on-point style-wise and I made a temporary golden retriever friend so this was just about perfect.

The downtown area of Detroit is a very unique mix of architectures with a lot of interesting public art and murals throughout. My love of walking aimlessly around was nicely rewarded by a number of encounters with beautiful and moving art.

Sometimes it just takes one reason to try on a city for a visit. While baseball brought me down here, all of the other activities and people I met made the trip itself memorable. As a took in the Sunday afternoon finale from a shaded seat down the right field line I was glad that this little challenge of visiting all of the ballparks gave me at least a brief window into Detroit….

…. and it didn’t hurt that it also let me meet another baseball team’s mascot. Paws looked pretty stoked to meet an old guy with an Expos hat from Saskatchewan. Just don’t ask me how many children I had to jostle aside to get his attention!