The last great adventure?

By Troy Foster

Today marks the first day of a two-month journey that seems like it could be our last. Two of my best friends have joined me in an attempt to see one baseball game in every Major League ballpark in America. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll attend our first game on Monday (May 26) in Seattle and end this adventure 74 days later in Phoenix.

But things rarely go according to plan — especially if your base path runs anywhere near mine.

We’re currently somewhere between Ellensburg and Seattle, looking for a cheap hotel for the night. We’ll have plenty of time to explain what we’re doing during the next 10 weeks, but if the first thing you’re wondering is how three relatively young men can afford to travel the entire nation with gas prices so high, we can’t. So we had to get creative.

I decided to name this blog “Cold Beer, Couches and Baseball” for a couple reasons. It was probably the first runner up for the name of our broader project — a series of short-form documentaries under the working title “BaseCrawl.” The second was that I really like the word “couches.” This is what I’ll be sleeping on for the next 10 weeks — on the GOOD days. With a few minor but notable exceptions, our plan is to avoid hotels altogether on this basecrawl. But things rarely go according to plan, especially if you travel anywhere near my base path.

Our adventure began in Missoula, Montana today. The plan was to leave at noon. But things rarely go according to plan. After leaving town at 6, the plan was to spend the first night on a federal campground in a tent. But things rarely go according to plan. When the heavens opened up and the rain began to pour, the plan was to expend some of our contingency funds on a hotel. The plan was to stay in Ellensburg. When Ellensburg was full, the plan was to drive on to Cle Elum. And when there was no vacancy in Cle Elum, then the plan became … well … I don’t know what the plan is anymore.

It doesn’t matter. Sometimes I tend to have woe-is-me, self-fulfilling prophecies, but nothing goes according to plan when you’re on the road, regardless of the company you keep. I might be sleeping in a Jeep tonight, but I’ll be sleeping here with two of my best friends.

It’s the first night of what might be our last great adventure. Why last? Because in my view we’re on the threshold of that imaginary line between youth and adulthood. The three of us straddle the big 3-0 … Nolan is 32, Daren is 28 and I turned 30 three months ago. None of us are married yet although some of us might be getting closer. We’ve stretched our youth about as far as it can be stretched.

I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about baseball, the cold beers we drink, the couches we sleep on and all the people and places at the center of our journalistic exploration. 

But for now I’m going to conclude this entry with a note about the reason we chose to embark on what might be our last great adventure. On more than one occasion during the planning stages of this project, we nearly pulled the plug out of fear, anxiety and even guilt. After all, we know there are people who might want to do what we’re doing but can’t, whether because of their line of work, a spouse or maybe because they have kids. So when the clock reached 11 and we entered the bottom of the ninth, the three of us had to finally make a decision. We knew we genuinely wanted to do this trip, but we weren’t sure we should. 

Ultimately, though, we did it because we could. 

(There’s more on this and our other adventures at BaseCrawl.com.)