Mile high baseball and beer

January 3, 2020December 31, 2019 / Greg / Leave a comment

With a very limited amount of time in Denver this past fall, I based my non-work time in the city around a couple of late season baseball games and some craft beer sampling. This is the luxury of second visits to places – there’s no need to rush around seeing the sights to alleviate the fear of missing out on something.

Once my meetings wrapped up on a Friday afternoon, I got to work in making the most of my weekend in Denver. First stop: my all time favourite piece of public art – “I See What You Mean” or as it is more commonly known as, “Big Blue Bear”. My weekend was off to a great start.

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Can I enjoy the faux Expos?

October 30, 2019October 29, 2019 / Greg / 2 Comments

While I’m always up for a baseball game, when I visited Washington this past summer, it was with some mixed emotions of heading to five Nationals games. You see, when my Expos were taken away from me, they were in essence handed to Washington to become their new team. And while time can erase a lot, I’m never sure of where I stand on this baseball team that now claims franchise records of the team I used to cheer for. Putting that all aside, I bought some tickets, and shortly after arriving in DC, I threw on my trusty Montreal Expos hat and headed for Nationals Park.

Just through the gate, I bumped into this guy, who gave me a presidential welcome for my first Nationals game.

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Let’s play two

August 17, 2019August 12, 2019 / Greg / 2 Comments

Chicago is one of my most favourite cities in the world. It’s a great eating and drinking city. It has stunningly beautiful art and architecture. It is filled with down to earth midwesterners who always make me feel at home. And, as a baseball fan, it has two teams, which means any spring or summer trip to the windy city will have baseball to watch.

When I made my original plans, it was as a solo visit, extending a work trip for a few days so I could get to 5 or 6 baseball games. The trip I planned wasn’t the one I ended up taking, and that was a good thing. Some last minute changes of plans meant my wife could join me for a week in Chicago. While she’s not a huge baseball fan, she’s always up for a game or two. As both the Cubs and White Sox were in town, we decided on two.

So, game one – on a spectacular April afternoon, here we are checking out the ballpark in advance of a White Sox game against the Tampa Bay Rays.

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Gary Carter and the Mets

December 18, 2018December 19, 2018 / Greg / Leave a comment

The New York Mets hold a strangely special, but very small, spot in my heart. One of my most vivid memories of my childhood was returning home from being out with my mom and dad on a December evening in 1984 and learning that my beloved Montreal Expos had traded my favourite player, Gary Carter, to the Mets. Feeling like a jilted lover is how I now recall how I felt that night. Whether or not it is possible for a ten year old to feel that is beside the point. I was devastated. After Blue Monday in 1981, this was the second of a long line of baseball-related traumas I experienced leading to my Expos leaving for Washington.

Time heals everything, and while I haven’t yet got my Expos back, I’ve learned to love baseball again. So when work took me to New York for a few days back in September, I added on a couple of nights to hang out in Queens and watch the Mets play the Phillies. The Mets to me are the team that got Gary Carter his lone World Series victory, and wearing this Expos hat got me into some great conversations around the ballpark.

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Take me out to 5 ballgames

November 2, 2018November 1, 2018 / Greg / Leave a comment

I aim to take full advantage of my solo trips. When I’m traveling alone, I make the kind of plans that I couldn’t get away with if I was traveling with others. My favourite solo trip plan, something I’ve been doing the past few years in an annual tradition of sorts, is to camp out in a big American city for 4-5 days, and spend most of that in a ballpark nerding out over baseball. The last few years I’ve pulled this off in Baltimore, Minneapolis and Chicago. This year… Philadelphia.

Five nights, five baseball games. After arriving in Philly via a red-eye and fortified by a brief nap at my downtown hotel, I hopped on the Broadway subway line and made my way out for night one at Citizens Bank Park in south Philadelphia. I treated myself to what would be the best seat of my visit a mere ten rows off the field. Here’s the first pitch from that glorious seat.

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Baseball trip 2017

December 16, 2017December 9, 2017 / Greg / 3 Comments

Every summer I take a four or five day baseball trip. The calculus is normally fairly simple – where can my airline points get me and where is there a decent deal on a nice hotel. As long as there’s baseball and summer nights with a cold beer in my hand, the teams and the city don’t matter too much. While I was planning my trip this year, I had more trouble than normal finding a combination that would work in my schedule. I went through permutations for Milwaukee, St. Louis, Denver, San Diego, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit and a host of other cities until I found that the only place my about to expire United points would get me to was Baltimore. Never really had any desire to visit Baltimore, but Camden Yards and the promise of four days of fresh crab was too good to pass up.

After flying on a red-eye flight through Toronto and sleeping in Pearson for a couple of hours (using points isn’t always glamorous), I arrived in Baltimore slightly jet-lagged, but happy to walk into Camden Yards – a temple of baseball on a scorching hot Saturday night. She’s a beauty ballpark.

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Baseball, Bartolo and the Braves

August 15, 2017August 10, 2017 / Greg / 1 Comment

A summer afternoon at a ballpark, beer in hand, nerding out watching a ballgame is pretty much perfection for me. I was heading to Atlanta for a conference, and by adding a couple of days onto the front of the trip, I got myself to a game in the brand new stadium in Atlanta. SunTrust park had only seen 11 previous games to start the season so many fans were seeing their first game here. It created a great pre-game and in-stadium buzz. Even a couple of hours before first pitch, there were lots of folks hanging out around the stadium.

Although there was plenty to do, see, eat and drink outside the park, shortly after the gates opened, I took up a spot in the centre field seats to watch the end of batting practice on what was a perfect afternoon for baseball.

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Guys weekend in Montreal

July 17, 2017July 15, 2017 / Greg / Leave a comment

The idea for a guys weekend in Montreal with my dad started with a desire to relive some old times in the city. Aside from family road trips to visit my mom and dad’s relatives in New Brunswick, my first real travel experiences were with dad visiting Montreal to take in Expos games in the early 1980s. Those trips were fun times and the memories of them still float around in my mind from time to time. The excited feelings I had when I first arrived in Montreal as a child on the train on those trips are pretty much the same feelings I have today when I visit a place for the first time.

So with nostalgia sparking the idea, and a couple of Blue Jays preseason games in Montreal this past March forming the cornerstone of a trip, I invited my dad on a guys weekend in a city we both love. I flew in from Saskatoon, him from Halifax, and we met in the Montreal airport ready to relive some good old times and to see what kind of trouble we could get into. Trouble is all relative of course, and 40-somthing me and 70-something dad were both up for some unhealthy but delicious eating. First order of business was a smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s.