Planes, Trains, and Automobiles....

It took about 2 1/2 weeks to organize my travel plans...21 flights, 6 trains, and 3 buses.

Most MLB games start around 7pm, which provides plenty of time for a morning or early afternoon flight or train between cities.  If I wanted to I could sleep in to about 8 or 9 am, catch an early afternoon flight, head straight to the park, watch the game, and head to the hotel.

I don't want to do that.  For most of these parks and cities, I will not be coming back so I wanted to allow time to tour the city and the park before the game.

Also places like Boston, St Louis and Baltimore have some cool amenities around the ball park that I want to check out.

So in a nut shell, my goal is to arrive early enough to allow about 4-6 hours in each city before heading to the park. This will mean a lot of 0600-0700 flights but, what the heck, it will be worth it.

I have tried to allow as much time in DC as possible to be able to have a good look around, so I will fly in early from Boston and leave later the next day to Baltimore.

I have no interest in Oakland so I will fly into San Francisco early, spend some time in town, take the BART to Oakland, then fly to Seattle after the game.

The main challenge with travel has come with the day games.  Since these start around 1pm I will need to catch the first flight of the day, and head directly to the park.  My longest day, by far, will be July 20th.  I will need to catch a 0500 flight from Cincinnati to Phoenix to get there in time for the 1240 start, I will then be on the red-eye to Boston that same evening.

So not much sleep from July 8th to August 9th but on the bright side, I should accumulate enough flight and hotel points to pay for my trip to the World Series, at Wrigley Field, in October.

Where do I start?

There were three things I considered when creating my schedule (and in this order); the game dates, travel, and accommodation.

The first thing I did was input the entire 2016 MLB schedule onto a spreadsheet.



For each team, I was only interested in home games so I did not enter road games.   I then organized each team into geographic areas and highlighted the dates when these teams were playing on consecutive dates.   This helped me see patterns and attempt to avoid bouncing back and forth across the country.   I was able to locate days where I could see Mets/Yankees, Miami/Tampa, Astros/Rangers, and Detroit/Cleveland on consecutive days.  I also spotted a nice grouping of west coast teams in July around the All Star break.

It also helped me see what teams I could use to "fill the gap" between geographic areas.  After Tampa, I was able to find a game in Atlanta prior to heading north to Detroit/Cleveland and the east coast.  

Cincinnati and Houston proved to be the most tricky.  Cincinnati has relatively few road games during the period I chose and Houston, while it fit in nicely with Texas, is an afternoon game.  This will mean a very early flight out of Baltimore that morning.

Initially I had the Rockies on July 18th followed by Arizona and Cincinnati.  However, Cincinnati is an afternoon game on the 20th.  This coupled with the eastbound time zone change would have made it nearly impossible to get a flight out of Phoenix in time to catch the game in Cincinnati.  Switching Cincinnati and Arizona allowed me to take advantage the time zone change going west and should buy me enough time to get to Arizona in time for the 1240 start.

I could have scheduled Houston and Texas earlier in the schedule, but the opportunity to get all the west coast teams done within the first week was way to enticing.

After all that, which took about two weeks, this is what I ended up with:

The website www.baseballtripplanner.com has a tool which allowed me to input my game dates and come up with a map.  If anything, this is proving to be a good lesson in geography.



In my next post, I will describe the process I took to schedule the transportation.

All roads lead to Wrigley

My mother recently passed away and left behind a small sum of money.  I have elected to spend these funds on the experience of a lifetime, I am going to visit all 30 MLB parks this summer in a single trip.

This trip has always been a "bucket list" item for me and I know that this is something that my mom would be proud of.  So mom, this trip's for you.

I live in Edmonton and the the closest MLB park is in Seattle, a 2 hr flight (18 hr drive) away.  

To visit all 30 MLB parks over the course of a single baseball season would involve several back and forth trips between Edmonton and various cities in the U.S.  That would get really expensive, really fast.

The other option, which is what I have elected to do, is to visit all parks in a single trip.  I'm not out to set any records.  The record is held by Chuck Booth, in 2012 he visited all 30 MLB parks in 23days.  My goal was to do the trip in 30 consecutive days...30 in 30 had a nice ring to it.

However, after two weeks of analyzing various schedules I realized something,  I could end this trip at Wrigley Field on August 9th, my 40th birthday.   As a result, the earlier part of my trip would take place during the All Star break.  Which means it would be impossible to do this trip in 30 days.  But as a die hard Cubs fan, there is no better place to end a trip like this, so that is what I will do.  Plus I will get to see both the Home Run derby and the All Star game in San Diego.  Win win.

The result?  All 30 MLB parks in 33 days.

This is not a road trip, while there will be some driving I do plan on taking advantage of some quicker forms of transportation such as planes and trains.

The next few posts prior to my trip will explain how I organized this: