Jensen Family Baseball Trip - Year 5 - The Midwestern Tour

Baseball, a spherical shaped bundle of twine, tightly wound, wrapped in two figure 8 pieces of leather that are bound together by 108 stitches.  It is a little over 9 inches in circumference and weighs a little over 5 ounces.  It is a rather insignificant object when you get right down to it.  But not at our house.  The spring and early summer of 2019 has been dominated by the game of baseball.  Trey and Tate both played for the Heritage Middle School team and have also played travel ball since those seasons finished up and have played nearly every weekend since.  And I just finished coaching the high school team and have been helping out with two travel teams since then.  So it is only fitting that when those activities wind down, we should begin our annual trip to fulfill our quest to see as many major league ballparks as we can before the boys graduate from high school.

To recap, in 2014 we began our endeavor with the Northeastern US where we saw Philadelphia, New York Mets, Boston, New York Yankees, and Baltimore, all while getting in a trip to Cooperstown to see three of my beloved Atlanta Braves being inducted: Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and Bobby Cox.  The next year (2015) we went to Cincinnati, Detroit, Toronto, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland.  In 2016, we went on a family cruise and left out of Florida which allowed us to take in Miami and Tampa.  In 2017 we decided to take a year off from Stadium Touring in order to save up for the big trip in 2018 - that being the MLB All-Star Game at Nationals Park in Washington D.C.  Of course, we usually made a trip or two to Atlanta each year to see the Braves, which we did in 2018 to see the opening day at Suntrust Park where we saw a walk-off win against the Philadelphia Phillies.  So, if you're counting, that brings the total number of stadiums that our family has visited to 14.  This year's trip would be the most involved yet as far as how tight the schedule would be as well as the number of miles we would be driving.  But that has never been a deterrent before.  It just makes it more of a challenge.  This year, we are going to attempt to see St. Louis, Kansas City, Minnesota, Milwaukee, and both Chicago Stadiums - all in 7 days!!

Day 1 - Friday, June 21st - We head out from Rutherford College at about 8:30 in the morning and drive just about all day to Fairview Heights, Illinois, which is just about 10 miles from St. Louis where we bed down for the night to see our first game the next day.  It took about 12 hours to get there if you factor in all the times we stopped for meals and to stretch our legs.  The next day we would be heading to Busch Stadium.