Travel doodling, MLB edition

While the summer of 2019 was intense in terms of medical drama, it was light on time-consuming activities. No softball, not a lot of golf or disc golf. Few outings to restaurants, theaters or even family events. I had spare time on my hands and the travel bug ate away at me. So I devoted a few hours to “travel doodling” – imagining a long RV trip. But it had to be travel with a goal. I decided that a worthy goal would be visiting all 30 major league baseball stadiums in a single season.

The rules were:

  1. Start and end in Fort Myers FL.
  2. Travel no more than 300 miles per day when traveling.
  3. Stay in an RV park within 20 miles of the ballpark (exception: an American RV park was needed for a Toronto game).  Due to the proximity of two stadiums each in San Francisco/Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, the tour would require just 26 hops to visit all 30 ballparks.
  4. Arrive for a game early in a homestand and stay at least one additional game, to allow for rainouts.

The question was: how difficult would it be to complete the tour in a single season?

I started with the 2019 season and found that it was relatively easy to achieve the goal.  Specifically, I concocted a tour that would finish on 9 Sep 2019, nearly a month before the end of the season.

Just about the time I reached this conclusion the 2020 MLB schedules were released, so of course I had to repeat the tour using the 2020 schedules.  This was easier as could pretty much replicate the sequence of cities that worked in 2019.  That sequence, with some minor changes, still worked in 2020: I would finish this imaginary tour on 23 Sep 2020 – closer to the end of the season than in 2019, but still eminently feasible.  The reason that the 2020 schedule was more difficult was that I had to wait long periods for teams to return from travel.  For example, there are 11 days between the game in Detroit and the game in Cleveland, despite needing just a single travel day to get to Cleveland.  Guess I would have to find something fun to do in either Detroit or Cleveland to kill the time.  Easier said than done.

This is the 2020 sequence of cities, dates, games and approximate travel miles on the hop:

  1. 3/28, Tropicana Field, St Petersburg FL, Pirates vs Rays, 113
  2. 4/3, Georgia State Stadium, Atlanta GA, Marlins vs Braves, 477
  3. 4/7, Minute Maid Park, Houston TX, Mets vs Astros, 791
  4. 4/9, Globe Life Park, Arlington TX, Astros vs Rangers, 256
  5. 4/13, Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City MO, White Sox vs Royals, 559
  6. 4/18, Coors Field, Denver CO, Cardinals vs Rockies, 608
  7. 4/28, Chase Field, Phoenix AZ, Astros vs Diamondbacks, 866
  8. 5/1, Petco Park, San Diego CA, Dodgers vs Padres, 356
  9. 5/4, Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles CA, Cubs vs Dodgers, 157
  10. 5/7, Angel Stadium, Anaheim CA, Nationals vs Angels, 0 (same RV park as for #9)
  11. 5/16, Oracle Park, San Francisco CA, Braves vs Giants, 426
  12. 5/19, The Coliseum, Oakland CA, Rangers vs Athletics, 0 (same RV park as for #11)
  13. 5/29, T-Mobile Park, Seattle WA, Braves vs Mariners, 808
  14. 6/16, Target Field, Minneapolis MN, Brewers vs Twins, 1655
  15. 6/22, Miller Park, Milwaukee WI, Blue Jays vs Brewers, 366
  16. 6/26, Guaranteed Rate Park, Chicago IL, Athletics vs White Sox, 108
  17. 6/29, Wrigley Field, Chicago IL, Brewers vs Cubs, 0 (same RV park as for #16)
  18. 7/3, Busch Stadium, St Louis MO, Brewers vs Cardinals, 302
  19. 7/10, Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati OH, Pirates vs Reds, 358
  20. 7/17, Comerica Park, Detroit MI, White Sox vs Tigers, 263
  21. 7/28, Progressive Field, Cleveland OH, Royals vs Indians, 169
  22. 7/31, Rogers Centre, Toronto ON, Orioles vs Blue Jays, 291
  23. 8/10, Fenway Park, Boston MA, Twins vs Red Sox, 547
  24. 8/14, Citi Field, Queens NY, Phillies vs Mets, 213
  25. 8/17, Yankee Stadium, Bronx NY, Rays vs Yankees, 0 (same RV park as for #24)
  26. 8/21, Camden Yards, Baltimore MD, Red Sox vs Orioles, 201
  27. 8/25, Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia PA, Pirates vs Phillies, 199
  28. 8/28, Nationals Park, Washington DC, Phillies vs Nationals, 134
  29. 9/1, PNC Park, Pittsburgh PA, Brewers vs Pirates, 248
  30. 9/21, Marlins Stadium, Miami FL, Reds vs Marlins, 1173

I didn’t actually identify the RV park that would be used, so I used the distance between the ballparks as a proxy for the travel required for each hop. The total travel mileage for the 2020 tour: about 11,670 miles (including the 155 miles from Miami to Ft Myers to complete the circuit).  Whew!  The longest hop is Seattle-to-Minneapolis, a distance of 1,655 miles – about 15% of the total mileage.

MLB parks 2020 tour

MLB parks 2020 tour

I doubt if I will ever actually embark on such a tour.  But I could.  And it is fun to think about.

I wonder how much tickets to 30 MLB games will cost?

Categories: Preparation/Planning, Routes, Sports | Leave a comment

Chancellorsville Battlefield (Oct)

Chancellorsville battlefield

Chancellorsville battlefield

Photos in the museum

Photos in the museum

Auto tour marker

Auto tour marker

Visitor's Center

Visitor’s Center

The end of the year is approaching and I am going back through my photos trying to spot any posts that I should have made but didn’t. This is one – my brief stop at the Chancellorsville Battlefield on my way south with Rusty in October. We had to get both the dog and the car to Florida for the winter, so I drove both down. Mostly it was long hours of tedious driving, but I did stop in Chancellorsville after my overnight in Alexandria VA.

I was pressed for time so I didn’t do much more than tour the visitor’s center and drive part of the self-guided auto tour.

For a detailed description of the Battle of Chancellorsville, I refer you to the Wikipedia article here. The nutshell summary, though, is that this was a major Confederate victory just months before Gettysburg. Some historians describe this as Robert E. Lee’s “perfect battle” due to his brilliant strategy in outwitting and outfighting a vastly superior Union force. But he lost his best general, Stonewall Jackson, and the confidence in his invincibility that was engendered here may have resulted in his catastrophic loss at Gettysburg just two months later.

The Battle of the Wilderness, fought a year later, was very close to the Chancellorsville battlefield – just a few miles down the road. That was also a major Civil War battle that interests me but I did not have time to visit it. Next time.

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The inverter switch

Now that I have told you all about the inverter, let’s take a step back and deal with the more critical electrical problem: the failure of the inverter switch. The problem manifested, about 10 days ago, with the refrigerator suddenly and unexpectedly losing power. I was panicked at first, thinking that the refrigerator itself had failed – a problem that could potentially cost more than $3,000 to fix. But after trying several things (checking circuit breakers, jiggling wires, voodoo incantations) that were unsuccessful, I, on a whim, flipped the inverter (the old one that never worked) on. It still didn’t work, but it failed in a comfortably familiar was – the refrigerator came on, briefly, until the inverter overloaded and quit. This was pretty solid proof that there was no problem with the refrigerator (whew!) and that the problem was somewhere in the rather complex circuitry that powered it.

New switch and juntion box at end of installation

New switch and junction box at end of installation

So I got, from the file of RV stuff that we keep, the documentation on the inverter and, along with it, the documentation on the inverter switch. This is the electronic component that automatically switches the power on the refrigerator circuit between regular (land) power and inverter (travel) power. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that this switch was likely misbehaving. I pulled the cover off this box and the junction box below it, just to get an idea of the circuitry. I tried various things that sort of worked for a little bit, but then the circuit would fail again. I eventually gave up, re-routed the circuit to bypass the switch entirely and hooked it up to an external outlet. Then I ordered a replacement switch.

After a week of running the refrigerator on a jury-rigged circuit, I received the replacement switch. It took about an hour to install it. Much to my relief the refrigerator ran perfectly on both land and inverter power.

Total cost of the inverter and switch: about $300. But now, for the first time, I am confident that the refrigerator will have power when we travel.

Now we have to go somewhere and test it out.

As much as I hate spending good money on things that shouldn’t break, I am deeply grateful that it failed while we were in residence. Had that switch failed while we were up north, we would have returned to a refrigerator filled with thawed, rotting food.  It would have been an unholy mess and I can’t imagine what the smell would have been like or how long I would have had to toil to make the place livable again.  So if it had to fail, it picked a good time to do it.

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Farewell, inverter, we hardly knew ye

1500-watt inverter

1500-watt inverter, installed

For those one or two of you who read this blog regularly, you may recall that I complained some time back – certainly in the summer of 2017 and perhaps earlier than that – that our RV inverter – the electronic device that is supposed to provide AC power to our residential refrigerator while we traveled – wasn’t working. In fact it never, ever worked. Not once. Each time in cut in it almost immediately cut out, apparently due to what it perceived as an overload of its circuit. Consequently we have never been able to have the refrigerator operating while we traveled, which added an extra level of stress to each trip. We could be pretty comfortable with trips of less than 4 hours because the freezer was still below freezing when we arrived. But as we approached 5 hours on the road the freezer temperature creeped close to 32, running the risk of things thawing and bacteria growing. At the very least all of the ice in the ice dispenser would start to melt, creating an ungodly mess.

You might also remember that I complained about this to Camping World. It wasn’t really Camping World’s fault – it should have fallen on the manufacturer, Thor Industries. But it cost us $67 to have the less-than-brilliant technicians at Camping World look at the problem and declare that the culprit was a weak battery. Uh, guys, what part of “never, ever worked” (even when both the inverter and battery were brand new) did you not understand?

Beyond annoying. Infuriating.

Anyway, for a long time I thought that there was something wrong with the inverter. I eventually came around to believing that the inverter was fine but undersized for its job. The refrigerator was rated at 977 watts continuous consumption and the inverter was rated at 1000 watts continuous output. But the margin – 23 watts – was so small that if either rating was even a little bit off, or if the overload trigger was a little too sensitive, that it could fail to do its intended job. I concluded that simply replacing the inverter with a beefier model – 1500 watts – would solve the problem.

So I bought a 1500-watt inverter for $212 delivered and installed it today. Installation was a breeze – attach the 12-volt power lines and a ground, plug in the dynamic switch (the thing that switches seamlessly to use inverter power when the regular power is disconnected, either as a result of travel or a power failure) and mount it on the utility board in the front basement. Took about an hour. Initial tests suggest that it will work fine.

But I really won’t know for sure until we travel again.

If anyone needs a lightly-used (damn near never used) 1000-watt inverter, speak up.

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“The Soul of America” by Jon Meacham

Copyright 2018 by Merewether LLC. Published by Random House.

It seems that the purpose of this book is to make us feel better about having Donald Trump as President by pointing out other times in our history when things looked similarly bleak. Because the country has survived other bad times and bad leaders, Meacham tries to give us hope that “this, too, shall pass.” But I found it more depressing than comforting. I honestly hadn’t known much about some of the political travails in our early American history, nor some of the more recent seminal characters like Huey Long. I also hadn’t known the extent of the Jim Crow lynchings by the KKK and others – over 3,500, of which fewer than 100 were prosecuted and 12 were convicted. Depressing.

So the book is an interesting history read. But uplifting? Not for me.

5 out of 10.

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“The Brass Verdict” by Michael Connelly

Copyright 2008 by Hieronymous Inc. Published by Little, Brown and Company, New York.

This is one of the series of mysteries by Michael Connelly featuring Hieronymous Bosch, LAPD detective. But this one has a twist: Bosch is a supporting character. The main character is Mickey Haller, a lawyer fresh out of drug rehab who gets his career resurrected in a big way when another lawyer dies (shot to death) and he inherits his portfolio of 31 open cases. The big prize in that caseload is the pending murder trial of Walter Elliot, the head of a small-but-growing movie studio. So Haller is immediately thrown into an intense, high-profile murder trial. Some way to ease back into legal life.

Bosch is the detective who is investigating the murder of the lawyer. Haller first encounters him as he enters his inherited office to find Bosch poring over case files. He immediately kicks Bosch out of the office, but soon realizes that until the person who murdered his predecessor is caught he, too, might be in danger. This suspicion is heightened when, after working late in the office, he is attacked by a man in the parking garage – the same man that Bosch had shown him a picture of just a few days earlier. He ultimately teams up with Bosch to unmask the murderer.

So there are several mysteries here. Who murdered the lawyer? Why is Elliot adamant that there be no delay in the trial? Why is Bosch asking Haller about the FBI? All of these questions are nicely intertwined and completely resolved. I can’t say it is the most puzzling crime novel I have ever read as I correctly guessed the main culprit early on, but it moves along nicely and has more than the usual number of surprises.

The biggest problem, from a reading enjoyment perspective, is that Haller’s career reboot is ultimately not very successful. I found myself rooting for him and was disappointed that things did not work out so great. But such is life, I suppose. The lack of a nice, neat resolution makes the story all the more believable.

7 out of 10.

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Jett’s first wig

Back

Back

Front

Front

Jett finally broke down and purchased a wig. This was, in part, due to the unexpected assessment from her oncologist, that her hair loss may be permanent. Not good news, but we agreed that a good life without hair was still a good life.

Anyway, we visited a wig shop and she picked out one that was (1) short and (2) closely matched her eyebrows (which she hasn’t lost). She is pretty happy with her selection and so am I.

Categories: Health | Leave a comment

“The Black Widow” by Daniel Silva

Copyright 2016 by Daniel Silva. Published by HarperCollins.

This is my first Daniel Silva novel. Unlike most of my reading material (mysteries), this is a novel of international intrigue and suspense. The protagonist is Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy and assassin who is slated to become the next head of Israeli intelligence. But first he has one last operation to run in the field: insertion of an Israeli spy into the heart of ISIS.

Is becomes apparent in the first 50 pages, that this is one of a series of novels featuring Gabriel Allon. As I learned after finishing the book, it is one of a long series of novels featuring him: this is the 16th book in the series.

I was impressed with Silva’s skill as an author. He kept me interested, both with his characters and his plot. In part because so much came before, the oblique references to his history were somewhat lost on me. If I read more of this series I will start at #1.

The plot in this case was realistic: an ISIS plot to attack Washington DC and kill as many Americans as possible. The insertion of the spy – a female Israeli doctor of Palestinian heritage – into the heart of ISIS – was intended to discover plans for the next terrorist attack being planned by a shadowy ISIS leader named Saladin. The spy was successful in infiltrating ISIS but was not successful in preventing an attack. The result was harrowing. And sobering.

It wasn’t a fun book to read, probably because it was all too real and too possible. But I guess that is a tribute to Silva’s skill.

7.5 out of 10.

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First Florida infusion

On Monday Jett received her first immunotherapy infusion in Florida. It was performed at the Regional Cancer Center of Fort Myers, a very nice facility less than 15 minutes from our Florida home. All went well, though she felt weak for two days afterward.

The big accomplishment, from my perspective, was that all of the arrangements could be made in a short period of time so that she didn’t miss a beat on her every-three-weeks infusion schedule. I had to find a facility, make initial contact, arrange with UMASS to get her medical records sent to Florida, arrange an initial meeting with a new oncologist, get the Medicare paperwork done and then, finally, schedule the infusion. Most of the work could be – and was – done while I was still in Massachusetts. But then I had to rely on this new facility to follow through.

They did.

So there was more than a little sigh of relief when we first visited the facility and we discovered that it was much larger than we expected (indicating, in my view, that they really knew how to care for a cancer patient) and when Jett met the new oncologist and declared “I really like her!”

The actual infusion – sorry, I neglected to take a photo – occurred in a very large, open infusion room with at least 32 infusion chairs. We didn’t much like the open concept – it was a bit like getting an infusion on the floor of a convention center. But the nurses were very nice and the infusion was only 30 minutes (actually more like 90 minutes, but I think the next one will be faster) so we can tolerate the openness for 30 minutes every three weeks.

So, great relief and a renewed confidence that the forces are in place to continue the cancer battle.

Categories: FL, Health, Places | Leave a comment

Mostly back in Florida

Back home, a few minutes after arriving (notice the crumple bougainvillea)

Back home, a few minutes after arriving (notice the crumple bougainvillea)

Rusty, the Corolla and I are all back in Florida. Four days, about 1750 miles. The best thing that can be said about the trip is that my back isn’t too sore. And no breakdowns and no near-disasters. The worse thing that happened was that I took a couple of wrong turns. They added a few minutes and a few miles to the trip, but no big deal. I did end up crossing the Hudson River via the GW Bridge, which is never fun, but I made it.

Tony, at his place in Ocala

Tony, at his place in Ocala

On the last leg I stopped for 2 hours in Ocala to visit my son, Tony. We went to lunch. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year, so it was nice catching up.

Jett was supposed to fly in last night, but, as usual, her flight was delayed for hours. She will join us today.

I was pretty apprehensive about what I would find when I got into the RV. Mice? Spoiled food in the refrigerator? Dry toilets? Well, yes, the toilets were dry, but the seals seem to be okay. Likewise, the refrigerator didn’t seem to be harboring any bacteria colonies (though I will let Jett decide what freezer food can be kept). I even opened the half gallon of ice cream that had been in the freezer for 5 months and it was delicious. So my biggest fears were unfounded.

There were, however, a couple of unexpected problems. The water tasted terrible. I tried making coffee with the tap water and it was undrinkable. I used bottled water for the first cups, then let the water run for about 20 minutes to flush the lines. My coffee this morning, made with tap water, was good.

The other unexpected problems had to do with the TV and internet. The router, located in the shed, was off. All of the general outlets in the shed were out. Something happened during the electrical inspection that resulted in the outlets being disabled. I haven’t figured out what happened yet, but in the meantime I was able to move the router to the A/C outlet, which still had power, and get the internet back. I had to re-enter my ID and password to connect to Netflix, but I now have internet and Netflix.

Loading up the Corolla

Loading up the Corolla

Downsized storage

Downsized storage

I had been notified a few days ago that my beautiful bougainvillea bush had broken free from its support and was doubled over. I straightened it up and reattached it to its supporting stake. Hopefully it will survive as it is a beautiful bush.

I had loaded the car with as much stuff as would fit, leaving the storage unit (downsized from 5×10 to 5×5) only half full. I think I might be able to fit what is left into a large SUV. Then I can close out the storage unit and save $68 per month.

So, I am pretty much back in residence in Fort Myers and, hopefully, today Jett will be able to say the same. She will continue her immunotherapy treatments here. She already has a meeting set up with the oncologist on Friday.

Today the high temp in Chelsea MA will be in the 50’s; it will be nearly 90 here. Jett will like that.

Categories: FL, Places, RV Living | Leave a comment