My Annual Baseball Trip

This past weekend I took my annual 'boys weekend' trip.  I will try to sum it up for you over the next couple of blog posts.

If you've never heard or read about this before, each year me and my good buddies from high school try to take a trip to see a different major league ballpark.  We do our best to make it somewhere the Cubs are playing so we can do the ol' kill two birds with one stone thing.

With marriages and kids, it's become increasingly difficult for the entire crew to go, so this time around it was just me and my buddy Jeff.

Our first stop was St. Louis.  We left first thing in the morning and pulled into town about 90 minutes before the game.  It was the Cardinals hosting the Mets.  It was pretty muggy but fortunately we were in the upper deck and out of the sun, so we stayed cool with frosty beverages.

While I will always be a die hard Cubs fan, I will give Cardinals fans credit for having a beautiful stadium.

We had tickets for the St. Louis Arch, so we left the game after it had gone into extra innings.  (Lucky we left when we did... it went into the 18th inning, with the Mets beating the Cardinals 3-1.)

We walked back to the truck to drop off our stuff and then made the short walk down to the arch.  Due to a lot of construction it took us a few tries to get down the right street.  While it doesn't look too big, standing next to it you get a true grasp of its size.

(Fun fact.  The arch is 630 feet high.  It's also 630 feet from one side to the other.)

Once you go through the underside, you get in line and eventually shuffle with the crowd to the elevator station.  Kind of like a space capsule with five seats, you cram in with other people and have an uncomfortable 4-minute ride to the top.

The special lift design keeps the car upright as you climb, so the car doesn't have to lean to follow the curvature of the arch.  Watching out the door you can see the 1,000+ steps that are available (if you are the poor soul who has to climb).

I'm claustrophobic, so needless to say this entire experience was rather difficult for me.  Once you arrive at the top, you still have to climb 30 to 40 steps to arrive at the viewing windows at the top.

When you get to the top of the arch, there is a walkway with a number of windows on both sides.  With all the people brushing past you and the height visible from the windows, it was pretty terrifying for me.

I mustered up the courage to take a selfie so you can see how big the windows are.

(You can see Busch Stadium in the backround.)

If you lean on the wall you can pretty much get a straight down look.  To one side you'll see the beautiful Mississippi River.

To the other side, if you look straight down, you get a great view of the construction project going on, to fix up the area around the arch.

If you look up from that view, you get a great shot of St. Louis.  From this angle you can see Busch Stadium.

St. Louis is a cool town.  If you get a chance to travel there, I do suggest it.

Tomorrow I'll share part two of our journey... over to Cincinnati for a Reds/Cubs game and quick drive to Louisville, Kentucky to see the Louisville Slugger plant and Churchill Downs.

Thanks for reading.

~CMF