Day 1 Tales From the Road

Car packed, fuel tank full, cooler loaded. We hit the road from the Josh Wood Mansion in Valpo at 6:15 a.m., and made it to beautiful Cincinnati, Ohio, by 11 (Eastern time).

Cincinnati, by the way, is quite possibly the most difficult city name to spell. Period. Which letters are doubled? Makes no sense to me.






The guys look really, really thrilled to be up with the sun. And, somehow, Miles' brother, Neal, seems to have somehow slipped into the back seat. Or Miles is just having a bad hair day.










Here it is. The somewhat beautiful Great American Ball Park. Until we arrived in Cincinnati, I didn't realize that 'Great American' was actually an insurance company, and not the Reds being overly nationalistic and patriotic.

Our verdict: The stadium looks much better on the outside than it does on the inside.






I spent a lot of time coloring these not-so-fancy signs outlining the itinerary of our trip and shamelessly promoting this blog. We'll have a picture very similar to this at each stadium we go to. And hopefully this blog soon becomes one of the Web's most popular sites.








An inside view of Stop No. 1 on our trip. The stadium feels very small compared to a lot of places, but it's a cozy little park. We were impressed with the the number of fans that showed up today -- 35,000 -- but the atmosphere was more than a little lacking, even with Junior Griffey chasing a massive milestone.

In center field, you can see the 'Pepsi Power Stacks' that shoot fireworks after every Reds home run. Its the early leader for the 'Cheesiest Unnecessary Corporate Sponsorship' award.


Here's Griffey trying to hit No. 600. Not happening today. Thankfully, we see the Reds in Philadelphia on Wednesday, so we get to see another chance at it.

They're already selling T-shirts at the stadium honoring Griffey's 600th home run. That'd be ironically tragic if tomorrow Junior tears his ACL for the 20th time in his career and doesn't get it this season.




Us in our seats, with the signs again, and a straggler we picked up along the way. Actually, that's our fellow Valpoite Anni Metz, a girl who loves Cincinnati a lot. She's the only Metz we'll see on this trip, sadly, as the New York version will be out of town when we head north.

Our signs created quite a commotion in our section when everyone saw what they signs said. A lot of people wanted to join up, it wasn't hard to tell that they were 'Red' with envy. Or maybe sunburn -- it's hard to tell. We all fried in the left field bleachers on a 85 degree day.

Anni was the first signature on the back of our signs. She needs some more practice with that autograph, though. You can tell she's not used to being famous yet.

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