Day 1 - Baseball Trip 2018 - Here We Go Again - #14 Nationals Park - The Midsummer Classic - The MLB All-Star Game!

It’s been three years since our last big baseball trip when we traveled around the Great Lakes to take in Cincinnati, Detroit, Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland. And that brought the total number of stadiums for the boys to 11. Two years ago we went to Florida and saw Miami and Tampa Bay, which were sandwiched around a cruise to the Caribbean. 13 down. Last year we decided to take a year off from the big mission and we just visited our beloved  Braves and their brand new stadium - SunTrust Park (which is pretty spectacular by the way).  The year off, if you can call it that, was so we could get ready for the next big adventure, and that was to try to get to the MLB All-Star Game.

Four years ago we started on this journey to see as many Major League Baseball Stadiums as we could. In 2014, we took an unbelievable trip to Cooperstown to see the Hall of Fame induction ceremony where 3 of our beloved Atlanta Braves were enshrined - Bobby Cox, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine among others. And on that trip, we went to stadiums in Philadelphia, Boston, both in New York, and Baltimore. We were supposed to go to Washington but by the time we were ready to go there, we were so tired we decided to skip that one and come home. My lovely wife (and event planner/coordinator) Tammy, who is always planning for the future discovered that the All-Star game in 2018 would be played in Washington D.C.  She said we could see that stadium when we go to the All-Star game!

Now, I remember thinking at the time that, Yes! That would be so amazing. But then I started thinking that our last name is not Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. There is no way we could afford that. Thus, the year off.  And I guess this is where I had underestimated our C.F.O. (Tammy) and her ability to budget properly to make this happen.  So here we are.  It's 2018 and we have done it.  We have done the research, pinched and saved our pennies and yes, we are headed to Washington D.C. for the All-Star Festivities.
So we started early, or should I say Tammy got started early on the planning.  We booked a week long stay at a basement apartment in the Capitol Hill section of D.C. on Airbnb.  It turns out the place was very adequate even though parts of the neighborhood were pretty sketchy, but I'll elaborate on that in a later post.  We purchased our tickets for the 89th MLB All-Star Game on StubHub and the tickets to the Home Run Derby on Vivid Tickets.  Now, as I eluded to earlier, we are not the Rockefellers and these tickets were not cheap.  And so now college is no longer an option for Trey and Tate but hey, we are making memories, right?  So we packed up the Minivan and headed out on Saturday to the nation's capital.
We arrived in D.C. around 4:00 in the afternoon and I had planned for us to see some of the sights and maybe see some of the monuments at night since they take on a different look and it is much cooler.  After we find our accommodations and get settled in, we decide to head into town to see the monuments.  We walk four blocks down to the nearest METRO station and purchase our cards to ride the subway (yes, it was obvious that we were tourists trying to figure out how to operate the ticketing machines).  Now they say D.C. is a walking city, but I had no idea we would have to do SO MUCH WALKING!!

Tate at the Lincoln Memorial

Trey and Tate in front of the Capitol

I think that night we walked 4 or 5 miles trying to see as much as we could.  We walked from the Capitol down across the mall past the Smithsonian buildings to see the Washington Monument, caught a glimpse of the White House.  Then headed to the World War II Memorial on our way to the Lincoln Memorial past the Korean War Memorial.  Then went to the Jefferson Memorial and back to the Subway station.  Needless to say, we all slept pretty well that night as visions of the next day's events were dancing in our heads - and that was to go to MLB FanFest at the Washington Convention Center.