New Year, New Trip

Hello baseball fans! A new year is upon us and so is the urge to break free of cold weather, if only temporarily (our next trip is going to purposefully attempt to make it colder as we attend Ottawa's Winterlude on Feb. 8).

Today I purchased plane tickets and made Hotel and Rental Car reservation for the latest installment in our Spring Training series.
We'll be staying at the Howard Johnson on Route 19 in North Clearwater near Dunedin and Safety Harbor. Likely non-baseball attractions include Honeymoon Island State Park, Brady's Backyard BBQ, and the St. Petersburg Saturday Morning Market.

The baseball schedule looks even more promising than last year. My strategy is to see 5 teams instead of 4 this year at 3 different parks including a real game at the home of the Phillies instead of just a free 'B Game' (though I will definitely be on the lookout for hastily scheduled B games).

The plan is to hit Brighthouse Networks Field in Clearwater on Thursday the 28th at 1:05PM for the Pirates and Phillies, Knology Park in Dunedin on Friday afternoon for the Tigers/Jays game, and finally our last trip to Historic Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg before the Rays move their spring training to Port Charlotte, Florida next season. There is also serious talk that Al Lang will become the site of a proposed new Rays ballpark. We'll personally be sad to see it go should voters approve of the proposal to use this public property, but we'll be sad anyway to not be heading back there for games in March.

I'll finish by saying its not too late to join us. We were able to get airfare on JetBlue at a nominal rate of $69 heading down and $99 coming back. After all the taxes and fees, it's $210 round trip per person. I was able to find these rates for a Feb 27-March 1 Roundtrip out of Rochester, Syracuse, and Newark.