He Knew He Was Right

So, when I visited Hot Springs National Park on my last trip, it kind of rekindled a somewhat dormant desire to see National Parks. Ballparks and football stadiums have been the focal points of my non-ski travel quests lately. When I stitched together this recent trip to some southern ballparks, however, and looked for things to do around Little Rock, Hot Springs jumped out at me. After stopping there (and, yeah, acquiring that Passports to Your National Parks ), I imagined my next couple of vacations with what NPs I might visit as a main focus of them. Bold shows what I've seen to date: Acadia, Maine American Samoa, American Samoa Arches, Utah Badlands, South Dakota Big Bend, Texas Biscayne, Florida Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Colorado Bryce Canyon, Utah Canyonlands, Utah Capitol Reef, Utah Carlsbad Caverns, New Mexico Channel Islands, California Congaree, South Carolina Crater Lake, Oregon Cuyahoga Valley, Ohio Death Valley, California  Denali, Alaska Dry...

I first saw it in one of the U.S. National Parks of the Rockies--Glacier, I think, but certainly by the time I reached Yellowstone or the Grand Tetons. It was there that I noticed a few hikers gathered around a National Parks Passport cancellation station. It was 1992, and I was really just getting started with my National Parks obsession. To that point, my visits to any of the places in the National Park System were limited: I had been to Gettysburg and Cape Hatteras when I was younger, I had driven to Mount Rushmore and the Badlands the year before, I toured Civil War battlefields early in 1992 and my Dad and I drove to Acadia earlier in August. That two-week gem, which started in the last week of the month, was my first National Parks focused trip and one of my all-time favorite travel adventures. I drove a large loop that led me first to Rocky Mountain National Park and then north to Little Bighorn Battlefield, before kicking into high gear with stops from Glacier National Park d...

It's still early in the 2015 MiLB season, and I hope to get to a few more ballparks this summer, but I did return from a fun trip down south where I got to four ballgames, four new stadiums, four games in different states (I'm now at 30 states, plus DC) and games in two more leagues. I'll do a summary post at some point of the traveling like I did last year , but when I got back from this trip, I suddenly became curious about where my last three trips have taken me, and what games I've had the good fortune of seeing. I've said before that I'm not really trying to see all of the AAA teams, or all of the teams of a given league (I don't think), but it struck me that I have seen affiliates of teams from all over the country. I saw an A's single-A affiliate in Vermont last year, a Twins AA affiliate in Connecticut a few years ago and I saw an Angels affiliate in Arkansas on this most recent trip. It seemed suddenly like I've seen affiliates for more te...