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Here’s an image from google maps of the route we will be taking on the trip, you can click here to see it in google maps. Start May 10th in Chicago, drive to Detroit for the Tigers vs. Yankees, then cross into Canada to Windsor. From Windsor we’ll head to Niagara Falls and check it out and then make our way to Cooperstown, NY to see the Baseball Hall of Fame. After that we will start on our way to Boston for the Red Sox vs. Brewers game and then head to New York for the Yankees Vs. Mets at Yankee Stadium. And from here head to Washington DC and hopefully check out the Nationals vs. Phillys. And then on our way back to Chicago we’ll stop in Cleveland to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and make it home on May 21st (or maybe later if Pat decides he can miss the rest of the week at work like me and Nick can). The trip will be a total of roughly 2,200 miles. Thank god for Pat’s hookup on rental cars, I think my car would die before we made it out of Canada.

With the dates getting closer and closer, we figured it was time to buy tickets to the games we intended on seeing. So last night we got together to figure it out. We had a late addition to the games in Boston and New York which made it a lot easier to buy tickets. Pat’s friend from Houston is going to fly out to Boston and come to the Boston vs. Milwaukee game, then ride with us to New York for the Yankees / Mets game, and then fly back to Houston from New York. This works out well because buying 3 tickets to sold out baseball games isn’t the easiest thing to do, nobody wants to break up a pair, and honestly who buys 3 tickets.

So first game is Detroit vs Yakees in Detroit. Everything would have been fine but there was a slight error in Pat’s spreadsheet and some dates/days got messed up a bit. It turned out not to be a huge deal, we’re just leaving a day earlier than planned (May 10th) and have a lot more time in between the Detroit game and the Boston game. It actually gives us more time to check out stuff along the longest stretch of driving on our trip, so no big deal. So now instead of just Cooperstown, we’ll also be checking out Niagara Falls, so I’ll have some cool pictures. So back to the Detroit game. It wasn’t as easy as we thought it was going to be since they are playing the Yankees. We figured it was Detroit, who wants to see them play, but we were wrong. The only tickets available through their website were standing room only, not happening. We ended up finding 3 tickets on stub hub, decent seats for around 60-70 a piece after all said and done. Yeah, it was a little more than we were expecting, but those damn commissions that stub hub charges are insane. We didn’t want to wait to buy tickets for these games, since the trip is based around them and we’d rather have them in our hands before we left. Next stop Boston.

Oh Boston, why do you have to be the most expensive ball park to buy tickets at. For this game, Boston vs. Milwaukee we needed 4 tickets so it would be a little easier to find tickets, which it was, but finding cheap tickets, not so much. Apparently Fenway is the most expensive ballpark to buy tickets for, and for about $150 per ticket on Stub Hub, we found that out. We were looking to sit on top of the green monster, but for $650 per ticket, it wasn’t worth it. So 2 down 1 to go, New York Yankees vs New York Mets at Yankee Stadium!

What we were anticipating as being our most expensive game turned out not to be, it was actually fairly cheap. We found these tickets on eBay and while they are a little higher up than our previous tickets, Yankee Stadium is pretty expensive when you get to the lower sections, especially when they are playing the Mets. We ended up paying $315 total for 4 tickets, so roughtly $79 per ticket, not bad.

So the last leg of the trip was going to be Washington Nationals vs Philadelphia Phillys, but with the mix up of dates/days at the beginning the time might run short so we didn’t buy tickets in advance. But the way we look at it, is a Nationals game really going to sell out? We didn’t think so either. So if we decide to it up that game we’ll just walk up to the box office and buy tickets the day of.

So with all of the games purchased we are looking at a total of around roughly $1100-1200 (Pat has the numbers for the 1st 2 games since he bought them so he could get the cash back on his credit card). 2 of those games were 4 tickets and 1 game only 3 tickets. So while it may seem a little pricey, when is the next time we’ll be out east and get to see Fenway and Yankee Stadium? Well I can tell you we’ll never see Yankee Stadium again since it’s being torn down after this season and as for Fenway, who knows how much longer it will last. So in our eyes this is well worth the money. And as far as the Hall of Fames go, we’ll just buy tickets at the door, haha, no need to buy them in advance.

I’ve also added a banner on the sidebar of this page which links to a Flickr account which is updated by my iPhone. So along with the millions of pictures I’ll be taking with my nice camera and uploading to the web when I get a chance, I’ll be taking pictures constantly on the road with my phone and those pictures will update instantly.

So if you couldn’t figure it out, this time around the roadtrip is based on Baseball and trying to get to as many games/stadiums as possible. My main goal was to goto the 2nd greatest / original baseball stadium still around, Fenway, before it’s torn down. No, I haven’t heard anything about tearing down Fenway, but it will eventually happen, and who knows when I’ll get to Boston again. Since I get to see Wrigley Field every year, multiple times, and it is by far the greatest park in all of baseball, I figured I might as well check out it’s slightly older, less attractive, possibly retarded, step brother while I have the chance. So we knew Fenway would be a stop on the trip, and of course since we were out that way Yankee Stadium is a must, and on the way there are a bunch of other parks we could see, but it ultimately came down to what fit in to the same time frame as the Red Sox and Yankees both having home games.

So here is what we came up with, or rather, Pat came up with for a game plan.

5/11/2008: Leave for Detroit
3:45 PM: Game 1: Detroit vs. Yankees
Sleep: Not Detroit

5/12/2008: Head To Windsor: Gamble/Party
Make fun of Canadians
Sleep: Windsor

5/13/2008: Leave for Boston
Stop in Cooperstown, NY - Baseball Hall of Fame
Sleep: Boston

5/14/2008: Tour Boston
Sleep: Boston

5/15/2008: Tour Boston
7:05 PM: Game 2: Red Sox vs. Brewers
Sleep: Boston

5/16/2008: Leave for New York
Sleep: NY

5/17/2008: Tour New York
8:05 PM: Game 3: Yankees vs. Mets

5/18/2008: New York

5/19/2008: Head To Washington DC
7:05 PM: Game 4: Washington vs. Philly

5/20/2008: Travel to Chicago
Cleveland - Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

5/21/2008: Make it Home

So this is the tentative schedule as of today. We’re going to start looking at buying tickets to the games this week, with the Mets/Yankees game set to cost a pretty penny, unless we want to sit in the bleachers which is ALCOHOL FREE… who wants to do that though? So we’ll see what happens, that is going to be our most expensive purchase for the trip, besides gas. But with gas split between 3 people it shouldn’t be terrible. Our estimations for gas, based on gas being $4 a gallon by that point (shitty) put us at $338.46 for gas, split 3 ways isn’t bad at all. We’ve estimated that the entire trip will cost about $1200 per person. This number is only an estimate as we don’t know how much hotels will cost, or the tickets, or even gas for that matter. If I remember correctly this is a little more than I spent on the west coast roadtrip, but that trip didn’t involve any baseball game tickets, and it did include a really shitty hotel that only cost $28/night.

So everything is coming along, everyone has the vacation time from work, so no issues there, money shouldn’t be a problem, and a car is basically secured, so we’re pretty much a go! As with the last trip I will be updating this website along the way with some pictures and updates on where we are. I will not be putting a ton of pictures here, but they will all be on facebook, and I will post a public link so everyone can see them whether you’re so lucky enough to be my friend or not. I will also bet “Twittering” along the way, which is basically just like the “Status” on facebook. You can follow my twitter here.

My laptop can also sync to my phone to use the internet, but this is mainly so that I can do some work in the car if an emergency arises. I didn’t have the same responsibilities at work that I do now when we took the first roadtrip, so there could be some issues I need to deal with, and I believe Pat may need to do some work as well. I was thinking about rigging up the GPS system to the computer so anyone could see where we are in the country when they visit this site, but I thought that might be kinda gay, but it could be cool as well, we’ll see. Oh and one of my biggest regrets of the west coast trip was not taking more pictures, so you better believe I will be taking a ridiculous amount of photos, another reason I need my laptop, since I only have a 1gig and 2gig CF cards, which will be filled up multiple times.

So since this is the first post, I’ll explain a little about what we’re attempting to do here. Our goal for this trip was to tour the east coast of the United States, while hitting as many baseball games we possibly could in 2 weeks. Most of you reading this know that me and a few other friends did the west coast a few years back and it was incredible. We started in Chicago, drove up to our friends lake house (who is now accompanying us to the east coast) just north of Madison, WI. We then proceeded to hit the Spam Museum in Minnesota and continue to drive as far west as we could in one day. 14 hours later we landed in Cheyenne Wyoming.

We rolled into Cheyenne at about 2AM, exhausted and just ready to lay down for a few hours before we started the drive to San Francisco. We had made no plans when we headed out on the road, except for the cities we wanted to stop in. This meant we had no hotel reservations anywhere when we started the trip, this proved to be a slight mistake when it came to Cheyenne, but was fine after that. Sturgis was going on in South/North Dakota at the same time, so all the bikers that were coming from the west decided Cheyenne would be a good place to take up sleep for the night, so basically that meant that every single ‘normal’ chain hotel was book solid, and probably smelled horrible. Since we refused to sleep in the car since we had a lot of driving to do the next day, we settled down at the ‘Motel’ motel. Yes this motel was so dilapidated that it couldn’t even come up with a catchy name, the sign just read MOTEL… awesome.

So I’m sure you’re already able to picture what the MOTEL looked like, and I bet most of your imaginations are correct. I compared it to the movie Deliverance meets Outbreak, I felt like cockroachers were raping me everytime I closed my eyes and that I was going to catch AIDS or even herpes just from sleeping on the floor. Yes, I had to sleep on the floor. The only room available was 1 queen sized bed, and with 3 dudes, that wasn’t about to happen…plus I felt much safer from disease on the floor than the bed, which only makes sense if you saw the room. And i didn’t sleep directly on the floor, i slept on the bedspread, with a shirt over the pillow. And the bathroom was a glorified outhouse painted puke green, I felt like I was in college again having to wear sandals into the shower.

So after the hotel experience in Cheyenne we decided it would be best to book a hotel that day for San Fran instead of risking sleeping in another rat infested shit hole where even the shower might have held a mystical disease scientists don’t even know about. So we drove up to the Holiday Inn that denied us entry the night before and used their free wi-fi from the parking lot to book our next hotel in San Fran, using priceline of course. So that was done and we set course to San Fran…. and 12 hours later and one cardboard license plate later we made it.

San Fran was cool as hell and best of all our hotel room was right in downtown, not expensive, and did not make me feel like I was going to die. We spent the entire next day/night there and checked out the Wharfs where the sealions just chillax all day. We didn’t head out to Alcatraz due to time constraints, which is probably the only thing I regret, but we were able to see it from the shore and it looked…cool I guess. We hit up a Ripley’s museum where I dropped off the kids and made sure to let the crew on duty know.

Then it was off to LA. We drove Route 1 all the way from San Francisco to Los Angeles and it was probably the most memorable part of the trip for me, it also took a long ass time, but was well worth it. LA itself was alright, we stayed in the actual city and only had 1 full day there before we drove to San Diego and then to Vegas, so obviously we couldn’t see everything.

So after LA we drove down to San Diego to check it out, but we were very anxious to get to Vegas so we pretty much ate lunch at McDonalds in San Diego, saw a pirate ship and got an oil change, and let’s not forget getting lost about 4 times and ending up back at the Zoo every time. We had to ask a cab driver to lead us back to the correct highway, thanks cab driver lady. So off to Vegas, where we did a lot of gambling and I don’t think anyone lost a large amount of money, I left Vegas even with what I came with so i was happy. Oh and a tip to anyone going to Vegas, $20 goes a long way when checking into a hotel. Iman slipped the dude a 20 and got us upgraded from the normal $99/night room to a mini-suite that normally costs $399/night and we still only paid $99, amazing. After Vegas we weren’t really looking forward to anything else so instead of stopping for a night in Denver we just drove straight back to Chicago, 28 hours straight. You can get pretty loopy from drinking Red Bull all night, wow. Oh and this was the only point when I seriously thought we were going to die on the trip. Driving through the rocky mountains at midnight, barely any street lights or cars on the road, Iman is driving…..while text messaging! Come on dude… seriously, I thought I was going to die…

So that trip was incredible which has obviously spawned the East Coast Roadtrip, 4 years later. This time I’m going with 2 different people than accompanied me to the west coast and it’s more baseball oriented this time. More information coming in my next post.