The Tally

Soon after christening this blog with its ridiculous but seaworthy name, I thought perhaps we should have called it 63 Innings, since that was how much baseball we set out to see. I now realize a more appropriate name would have been 147 Bags of Chex Mix.

In addition to downing approximately that amount of the salty party snack, we've put about 2,000 miles on the car, with about 300 to go (70 tonight from Hagerstwon, Maryland, to D.C., and another 230 tomorrow back to NYC). I've eaten three ballpark hot dogs, with a fourth to come; JF has eaten his body weight in convenience-store beef jerky. (I know: Yeesh.) We've made about 8,900 hillbilly jokes, used about the same number of different accents to make them, and become hopelessly addicted to the road atlas. (Columbus' population of 711,000 is the king of the mind-benders thus far; that makes it more populous than Atlanta, Austin, Miami, Seattle, and any number of higher-profile cities.)

We've also gotten, between us, about 9 hours of quality sleep, but we're having such a blast that another trip is being planned for the spring. This one, we think, will take us around Texas. There are big-league teams in Dallas and Houston, and minor-league teams in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. It would be a much more leisurely trip, and it would provide us with a lot of company, since I know friends or family in all those cities. We spent our time in Chicago with JF's brother, sister, and her boyfriend, and the non-baseball time we spent with them was one of the trip's highlights. Start submitting names for next year's blog now... We'll post a couple more entries to this one when we get to D.C., to wrap things up. Until then--JW