Baseball, Basketball and Disc Golf in Aggieland

We aren’t usually in our old home town in the Fall since we normally travel through  only in the spring. However, when we decided at the last minute this summer we weren’t going to winter in Florida as we originally planned, we pivoted and decided that we would winter in Arionna. As a result we ended up in College Station this fall.

Being In Central Texas in early fall means that everything is mostly brown after the usually hot and dry summers. This year is no different as the landscape is parched. One positive about being here in the fall which hadn’t occurred to us is we have found a lot of fall sports opportunities.

Fall baseball at Texas A&M University is in full swing and we were able to watch a few exhibition games. While neither of us are huge baseball fans there is nothing more entertaining about baseball than attending a game live. It sure was fun watching the Aggies play in their super nice stadium.

We also were able to watch a fall exhibition Men’s basketball game in Reed Arena. I use to be one of  the statisticians for the Men’s Basketball team so it was fun having this opportunity to watch college hoops again. The team has a new coach from when I was last in the arena so it was also fun to watch the new coach.

Texas A&M’s basketball was very impressive in the shellacking of a team they only beat by four last year. The talent added through the transfer portal appears to be very skilled. I think this year’s team is going to be way better than people think, so look out SEC these Aggies look pretty darned good!

We have also been playing some disc golf here. The courses in this area are not all that nice but they are about average in quality when compared to all the courses we have played across the country. Our favorite course is a challenging nine hole course which we usually play twice.

We rarely see anyone else playing disc golf in Bryan/College Station which explains the lack of quality courses . We find this surprising given there are over 60,000 students attending Texas A&M University and nearly 19,000 at Blinn College!

Our stay here is nearing its end and we will once again be on the road making our way toward San Antonio to spend time with our son and his family for Thanksgiving.

Baseball, Softball and Eye Surgery #3

We came to College Station Tx primarily for me to have eye surgery number three. As you may remember I had my first surgery to my left eye to repair a torn retina. My second surgery on the same eye was a vitrectomy to “fix” my floaters issue in that eye. Well a third surgery was needed because the previous surgery accelerated the development of a problematic cataract.

When surgery day finally arrived, Sharon took me to the outpatient hospital. She masked up as required and patiently waited for my surgery to end. An hour or so of surgery and I was done. I opted to get a “distant package” lens in my left eye and planned to get the right eye done a year or so later.

This package basically sets one eye to see clearly close and the other (your dominant eye) to see far away. Since my left eye was not my dominant one they set it for close vision. A few days after my surgery I wasn’t overly fond of the eye having only clear near vision now and not any away vision. As a result I went ahead and scheduled eye surgery number four for my right eye to complete the distance vision package.

Since my old glasses were still useful in the interim we took full advantage while waiting for surgery by going to a couple of baseball games to watch the Texas A&M University Aggies take on a couple of non-conference teams. We are happy to report that not only did we have a blast watching the games but our fightin’ Texas Aggies won both games.

Being equal opportunity supporters, we also went to watch a softball game at the new softball field. The women weren’t doing as well as the men in conference play but we still wanted to watch them play the first place (in the SEC) Arkansas Razorbacks. Although the lady Aggies were in last place somehow they managed to pull off upset walk off win in extra innings over the Lady Razorbacks! What fun!!!

We still have a lot of time to kill until my next eye surgery. Also, as a result of needing this surgery, we extended our stay here in College Station one more month until June 10th. This became necessary in order for me to make the many follow-up appointments post-surgery. Ahhhh, but such is our life on the Road of Retirement!

NOTE: We are now in College Station, TX until June 10th

A Visit to Hohokam Stadium and a few Breweries and a Mild Rant…

To pick up where we left off, here in Mesa, Az, we had one more social gathering to attend at one of the breweries in the little town of Chandler that was on my list to visit, the San Tan Brewery. Here we met Jeri and Terri (Just Wanderin’), Jim and Sandie (Where are the Dixon’s) and Paul and Marsha (Where’s Weaver) for a real late lunch or an early dinner. Of course we had a blast and no lies were told by anyone… I know because I was there and I must say there IPA was very, very good!

Another day there was a convention called Airpex which is the Arizona Federation of Stamp Clubs and was advertised as an “Attic Appraisal” where one could bring stamps and have them appraised. One thing I couldn’t part with when we sold our sticks and bricks home was my childhood stamp collection so out of curiosity I wanted to take my collection over to this Mesa Convention Center event to have them looked over.

I was charged $5 bucks entry even though the web site said it was free to attend. I asked about that and of course they said someone was supposed to have that changed … Strike 1… Once I entered I went to the “Attic Appraisal” table where a fairly pompous and self righteous fellow deigned to spend less than 2 minutes flipping pages in my collection (of which I have well over 100,000 stamps) stating rather flippantly that it wasn't’ worth much of anything.

 

I asked about my mint World War II German stamps and he had little to say.  When pressed  he said I should talk to someone at table 40… who said I should to talk with someone else… and finally the fellow who was knowledgeable about German stamps said it wasn’t anything notable. Again, when pressed he said my collection might be worth $20.00. These so called experts said my collection was worth less than the unused postage I have in the collection. In other words I could lick stamps, throw the rest away and get at least $50.00 for the collection. What a waste of time this was as it seemed to me these “appraisers” were not there to help anyone but merely looking for the occasional rare find to perhaps “steal” from someone's collection… Oh well, live and learn!

 

So the day wouldn't be a total loss we decided to go to Hohokam and Fitch Parks (both baseball fields and spring training facilities) in the City of Mesa.  This day at Hohokam Park, the spring training home of the Oakland A's, there was an open house event of sorts. Hohokam Park (pronounced HO-HO-COM) takes its name from some of the earliest residents of the “Valley of the Sun”: the Hohokam Indians. Since the event was free we checked it out and found mostly a venue geared to children but there was a nice live band and they had balloon rides (we just missed doing that).

 

As we were leaving we saw Bert Campaneris and Furguson Jenkins signing gear as a fundraiser for Breast Cancer. Sharon stopped and chatted with Bert to thank them as a breast cancer survivor for their charity work. It was fun and to cap off the day we drove over to Tempe for a visit to Sleepy Dog Brewery  where I had previously purchased a Groupon deal. We enjoyed some frosty beverages and took home a few bombers (as per the Groupon ). Their beer was not nearly as good as San Tan or Four Peaks but we will surely enjoy the bombers we brought home nonetheless.

Well it looks like we leave here on Wednesday and I just booked us into a Passport America stay at Las Colinas RV Park near Casa Grande and Eloy Arizona where we will likely stay 3 or 4 days before moving on over to Tucson… We both hope to see you on down the road…

Taking in a SD Charger Football Game with Friends…

We knew when we decided to book a two month stay in San Diego that we would be able to reunite with some friends we made here a few years ago. Our friends, Blake and Dawnderee, hail from northern California and aren’t typical RV’ers. They are in a smaller subset of those who RV sin order to follow their favorite sports team. In this case it is the San Diego Chargers. So they make an 8 hour trek down here to stay during the football season and when there is a few weeks gap they leave the RV locked up in their site to head back home t since Blake is still a working man.

We were in the park about two weeks before they returned and when we got  together it was like it was yesterday. We have been enjoying their company and especially when they treated us to tickets so we too could join them for the San Diego Chargers vs the Los Angeles Raiders.

 

Game day for a pro sports team is not a lot different than that for a big college rivalry game. However the fans for this rivalry game between San Diego and Los Angeles are a bit more “rabid” than most college fans. Raider’s fan’s were all decked out in costumes displaying their prominent colors of Black and Silver while the Chargers fans countered with Charger Jerseys and painted yellow and blue faces.

We set up our tailgate not too far from the entrance and tailgaters were everywhere with tents set up, chairs out and grills smoking.  I could also see lots and lots of red solo cups. We brought some steaks for the grill and our own adult beverages which nearly cost us a lot of money.

We found out that the stadium no longer allows bottled beverages into the game after an incident at a previous Chargers/Raiders game. Did I mention that these two fan bases don’t like either much?. A police officer reminded us in a not so friendly way that if we didn’t pour out our beverages and throw the bottles away that we would each get a $200.00 ticket. We complied with his request and were glad we did since the next group he found with bottles weren’t as fortunate as we saw him giving them a ticket…

We certainly had fun at the game with our California friends and are looking forward to other encounters such as bike riding on the beach and of course Taco Tuesdays. Life is good here in San Diego…

Left Albuquerque for Colorado…

We enjoyed our last few days in Albuquerque and especially all the red and green chile we consumed while visiting. It was fun visiting with Vicki and Roger and we really appreciated them letting us road gypsies spend a few nights with them while the RV was in the shop for annual maintenance.

Sharon wanted to explore the Nob Hill part of town so Sharon, Vicki and I drove into the city over by the University of New Mexico. Nob Hill is what I call the “college strip” or an area popular with the nearby college students. There were some trendy boutiques, lots of restaurants and drinking establishments. There were two breweries in the area as well so we visited the one with the higher Beer Advocate rating – Kelly’s Brew Pub. I treated the girls to a frosty beverage and we watched a bit of the World Cup… good fun and conversation!

Our last night in town we went to see a minor league baseball game as the Albuquerque Isotopes were taking on the New Orleans Zephyrs. The Isotopes are a LA Dodgers affiliate and although they lost there were lots of homeruns and very clever between inning entertainment. Vicki and Roger also said we needed to stay to the end as they put on a fantastic fireworks show. Pretty much the whole (nearly sold out) stadium stayed to the bitter end and indeed we saw an exquisite display of pyrotechnics!

The next morning we bid our farewells to our friends and headed over to Freightliner to pick up our RV. I had spent considerable time in the early hours of the morning route planning and we decided to head over toward Moab instead up up toward Alamosa or Denver. The main reason was three nice days of weather are expected in the Moab area which will be great for us to explore Arches National Monument and the Dead Horse State Park.

We drove further than we really like to drive but to take advantage of the weather situation we drove about 250 miles. We pulled into the Sleeping Ute RV Park near the Ute Mountain Casino for a one night stay. They are a Passport America Park as well so we were able to get an inexpensive one night stay. After getting settled we drove up to Cortez, Colorado and checked out the small town. Not much open on a late Sunday afternoon but we did find the Main Street Brewery. open for business. Sharon  later said this place had one of her top three Stouts.  It was a very upbeat, lively place to visit after a long drive and also a great way to celebrate Father’s Day! Hope everyone else out there had a great one too…

Going to Lambeau Field for some Tailgating…

Since there was a preseason game with the Green Bay Packers against the Seattle Seahawks we thought it would be cool to go down to Lambeau Field before the game to experience a Packer tailgate! We didn’t really plan to attend the game since the cheapest tickets I could find were still $75.00 which is way out of my budget especially for a pre-season game.

We got on-line to figure out how to best get to the stadium and find parking. Then I came across a site that said the bus line, the Green Bay Metro, provides free service to and from games. They run 3 hours prior to the game and three hours after the game. So we ditched the idea of driving down and planned to take the Cheesehead bus instead (they have clever names for the game buses depending on their route). Even better the bus stop is right here within 100 yards of where we are parked at Oneida Casino. So we chilled while waiting for the bus to get here.  Oops, then I noticed that the bus should be here in three minutes… so we rushed out of the RV and walked really fast to the bus stop when I remembered I had forgotten my camera so I sprinted back to the RV to get the camera and Sharon also wanted me to get her more comfortable walking shoes.

After getting to the RV I realized the camera was in the CRV in the parking lot so I once again sprinted to the lot and then decided to just drive the CRV over to the spot to save time. Once I got to the bus stop I could see the bus leaving and saw Sharon looking distraught… I told her to jump in the CRV and we would follow the bus to it’s next stop to hopefully catch it there. The next stop was a ways down the road but we managed to park in front of a restaurant and just did get on the bus.

There was standing room only on a bus filled with Packer fans all festively dressed in the colors of the Green Bay Packers. At least everyone but us since we had no Packer clothing. I told a couple of ladies sitting on the bus that I bet she couldn’t tell we were from out of town and it was our first Packer game. She then proceeded to tell us a lot of neat Packer stories and made the 20 minute bus ride to the game go by quickly.

Once off the bus the waves of people dressed in green and yellow were everywhere. Many of them were wearing jerseys of their favorite players… Rodgers, Matthews and even newcomer Lacy. There were a few who were donning wigs of the team colors and lots had face paintings as well. Sharon even got to have her photo taken with Saint Vince! Walking in the parking lot you could smell the Bratwursts and Burgers sizzling on the grill. Lots of folks were playing “cornhole” and swilling adult beverages… Yep the tailgate was in full force.. As we were taking in all the sights and sounds we drifted over to the food and beverage tent where there was a band playing that sounded pretty good.

As we squeezed our way through the crowd to see the band we were delighted when we saw how they were dressed…They were all decked out in classic nerd gear complete with taped glasses mismatched clothing and the drummer had a  colorful propeller hat.  The sights and sounds coming from them were top notch entertainment. The band called The Dweebs put on one heck of an show. We stayed for over an hour enjoying their music and hoping to win two tickets to the game a local radio station was giving away.. As they finally called out the names for the last tickets being given away, sigh, we weren’t winners, so we left the band and decided it was time to head back as the game was about to start.

We were going to just catch a city bus back but after having had to drive the CRV and follow the Cheesehead bus we had gotten close enough to walk back to the CRV. This less than 3 mile walk was relaxing as we meandered through quiet neighborhoods giving us time to unwind from all the high energy we felt at the tailgate… What fun our Green Bay tailgating experience was…

Monday Night Football and nearly time to go…

We arrived at Mission Bay RV resort on September 15th and on October 15th we had planned to leave the park… but only for 24 hours. The policy here is that you can only stay for 30 days and after that you must leave the park for 24 hours before returning. We decided we were not quite ready to leave beautiful San Diego so we pulled out of the RV park and simply went across the street in the parking lot to spend the night boondocking with a great water view of the Mission Bay Park. Hard to beat that for convenience!

Now there are plenty of signs posted warning  that there is no overnight parking however we have been here for a month and have everyday seen people overnighting in all the Mission Bay parking lots. To be safe we did not pull out the slides nor run the generator much.  This was easy to accomplish with 77 degree weather and the Bay breezes flowing through our open windows. The park is heavily used by fitness enthusiasts and families but other than one guy who parked beside us to listen to his hard rock music full tilt a couple of hours, it really wasn't bad.

Actually the boondocking timing was perfect as our friends and neighbors here gave us tickets to the Monday Night Football game between Denver and San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium… How cool is that?!  Thanks to Blake and Dawnderee for the tickets! It happened because Blake had to unexpectedly fly back home to take care of some time-sensitive business concerns.  He is a rabid Chargers fan and although he wasn't happy about missing the game, he really wanted Dawnderee to go and to have us accompany her. Therefore he generously gave his tickets to us.

Since the traffic is absolutely crazy on game day we decided to drive over to the Hazard Center to catch the tram to Qualcomm Stadium ($5 per person, round trip). The tram was stuffed with people as we squeezed in and become like one of many sardines preparing for game night at Qualcomm Stadium. The energy and excitement of the fans clad in their Charger gear was infectious so even in crowded conditions there were many smiles and laughter all around us.

After several stops where others tried to cram into the tram car we finally go to  Qualcomm Stadium! We followed the masses to the stadium entrance. We picked up a couple of cold beverages and made our way over to our seats on row 10 section 50, so close to the players we felt like we knew them. The game itself was only a part of the whole experience. A great deal of entertainment was simply people watching as there were numerous dedicated fans sporting elaborate game day costumes all around the stadium.  Not to mention the festive fireworks and hoopla surrounding starting lineup introductions and scoring celebrations.

The first half was all San Diego as their quarterback Rivers picked apart the Denver defense with precision. The Chargers defense and special teams contributed greatly to the 24 to 0 half time score. The blowout looked to be a certainty by halftime. Another cold beverage and the second half started…

One highlight of the game was getting to watch defensive player Von Miller in action. When I was a statistician for Texas A&M University I got to see him a lot while he played college ball for the Aggies. Also, another special treat happened at half time when golfer legend Phil Mickelson made a 100 yard chip that landed  on target thus winning $50,000 for charity.

The second half was all Payton Manning and the Denver defense as the score rapidly changed and before we knew it the outcome swung completely the other way changing the score to Denver 35 Chargers 24… needless to say disappointing lots of San Diego fans.  As we realized we still had to get home amidst the throngs we raced to the tram to be one of the first ones on.  Just like that the sardine tram arrived and we nabbed seats for the ride back to Hazard Station. We found the car and made our way back home slowly but surely…

What an absolutely fantastic experience to see a Monday Night Football with future hall of famer Payton Manning forcing a comeback win for his team. We are truly blessed and living right to encounter such special people as Blake and Dawnderee . Without their friendship and generosity we might otherwise never have seen a Monday Football Game… Our lifestyle really rocks…