A Trip to the Grotto (and Other Places in Europe)

I recently completed my fourth trip to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  I was in Ireland in 2012 for Notre Dame football.  I was in England in 2013 for Pete and Katie’s wedding.  I was in Italy and the Vatican in 2024 because I had always wanted to see Rome and the Vatican.  And this year I went to France, Spain, and Portugal.  Going to France made me think of what my friend Bobby once said about Canada:  “I have no desire to ever go to Canada, but I hope that I do someday.”  I had no desire to ever go to France.  I’m not a particularly big fan of France.  Sure, they helped us win the Revolutionary War, but we’ve more than repaid that debt.  Groundskeeper Willie referring to the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” is one of my favorite Simpsons lines ever.  But I’m glad I went to France.  There are two places in France that I have wanted to see.  One is Normandy.  As a student and teacher of history, I think that’s the number one historical site in the world that I haven’t been to that I would want to see.  I didn’t get there on this trip.  Paris is a city I don’t care about.  If I went there on my way to Normandy, that’s fine, but I don’t care if I never get to Paris.  I’m sure it would be cool to go to the Louvre, but I’ll be fine if I don’t ever do that.  Besides Normandy, the other place in France I wanted to get to was Lourdes (which was featured on Unsolved Mysteries).  That is pretty much why I went on this trip.  As a Catholic and a Notre Dame alumnus, Lourdes was the next place in Europe I wanted to visit.  The diocese put together this trip for teachers to France, Spain, and Portugal at a very reasonable price.  Lourdes was the first stop so I knew I wanted to go.  Spain and Portugal were added bonuses.

I took a walk down to the Grotto early in the morning and Mass was going on.

When I think of the Grotto at Notre Dame, I think of it being lit up in the dark on a cold winter night.  But I also think of lots of people there on a football weekend.  My experience at the real Grotto was a little bit like the Notre Dame football weekend experience at the Grotto.

The trip started with a long travel adventure.  It took about 22 hours from the time I left home to the time I got to my hotel in Lourdes.  We flew from JFK to Lisbon.  After a long layover in Lisbon, we flew to Toulouse.  Then it was a two hour bus ride to Lourdes.  I think the only single travel experience that took longer to get from where I started to where I finished was coming home from Australia (I think that took at least 24 hours).  It was late when we got to Lourdes so we had dinner at the hotel and that was pretty much it for the day.  I had a goal to have a beer from each country even though I was in the part of Europe that prefers wine.  I drank zero wine in each country and I was able to get a beer from each country.  With that first dinner, I had a Kronenbourg.  The Kronenbourg Brewery opened in Strasbourg, France, in 1664.  I don’t know how easy that beer is to get in the US, but I know I’ve seen it before.  Maybe it was common in England.  Anyway, the first picture I took in France was of my glass of Kronenbourg.

This was my first beer of the trip.

The second day in France was a lot of walking around Lourdes.  We participated in the rosary procession that night.  It was hot the first three days in France.  Fortunately we were staying in a French hotel that had discovered air conditioning.  The high temperatures in Lourdes those first three days were 90, 91, and 97.  It definitely wasn’t as bad as the heat in Rome, but it was hot (I had to wear long pants most of the time in Rome to visit the churches that we were going to).  On the third day (the hottest day), most people went to the baths in the morning and then we went up the Pic du Jer on a little train in the afternoon.  The train took us up most of the way up the mountain and then we could walk the rest of the way to the top.  I think it’s the first time I’ve ever been at the top of a mountain.  It’s definitely not a huge mountain, but there were some really good views.  Wikipedia says the highest point is 3,120 feet, but the map when we got off the train said 3,110 feet (actually it said 948 m, but I converted it because the metric system is stupid).  I was able to get a Pic du Jer beer that was locally made.  Drinking a beer on top of a mountain on a hot day was fun.  We went to the rosary procession that night with the intent of watching the procession from the ramps that go up to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, but it started raining and we went back to the hotel (we got back to the hotel before the heavy rain started).  On the fourth day, we did the Stations of the Cross on the Hill of Espelugues.  Apparently it gets to an altitude of 1,565 feet, but you start at an altitude of about 1,200 feet.  You start at the bottom of the hill and keep going up the hill until you get to the twelfth station (Jesus Dies Upon the Cross) and then you start going down the hill.  That night, it was drizzling again so most people didn’t do the rosary procession, but it wasn’t as bad as the night before and I wanted to watch it since it was our last night so I watched from above.

There are two different basilicas in this picture (the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception on top and the Rosary Basilica on the bottom).

This is the view of Lourdes from the Pic du Jer.

Here’s the 12th Station.

I had to wear my Notre Dame stuff at the Grotto.

This is the rosary procession from our final night in Lourdes.  There would have been a whole lot more people there if the weather had been better.

The following day was my Sunday in Europe.  We had two priests with us and they did Mass for us almost every day.  They were supposed to do Mass for us at a chapel by our hotel, but we got invited by a big group from the Archdiocese of Liverpool to Mass with their Archbishop at the Grotto.  So that was cool.  The Grotto was the highlight of the trip.  Of course, that’s where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette in 1858.  Many replica grottos have been built all over the world.  Wikipedia lists 47 in the United States.  Probably the most famous one is the Grotto at Notre Dame, which was built in 1896 is about one-third of the size of the Grotto in Lourdes.  The Grotto is one of my favorite places on campus.  The original Grotto reminded me of the Notre Dame Grotto during a football weekend because there were always so many people there.

This was Sunday Mass at the Grotto.

After Mass, we were on our way to Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast near the Spanish border.  We had some free time for lunch.  I went with a group of people to get crepes.  I had a crepe with ham, cheese, and egg and then a dessert crepe with chocolate.  The food made me think of the food in Italy two years ago.  It was good, but it wasn’t amazing (but there was good cheese that was widely available).  It’s not like I need to go back to France to have more authentic French crepes.  Then we continued to our hotel in San Sebastián, Spain.  That afternoon we walked down to the beach.  I had an 18/70 beer, which comes from LaRubia Cervezas.  I had a beer on a mountain in France and on a beach in Spain.  It was a good beer, but it turns out that it was from a Spanish brewery owned by Heineken.  I feel like that’s like getting a beer from an American brewery owned by Anheuser-Busch InBev.

This was the most Frenchy thing I ate.

This was my first beer in Spain.

We only had one full day in Spain.  We went to Loyola, where St. Ignatius of Loyola was from.  We saw where he was born and had Mass in the room where he recovered from injuries in battle and had his conversion.  St. Ignatius founded the Jesuits.  St. Ignatius certainly seems like a good guy, but when it comes to the Jesuits, I’ll just say that I liked Pope Francis a lot more than most modern American Jesuits.  After Loyola, we were back in San Sebastián for some free time.  We did Spanish tapas.  I got scrambled eggs with cod and ham and cheese croquettes.  I had some beer that the bartender told me was from Spain, but I have no idea what beer it was.  The beer was good.  Again, the food was good, but nothing that I need to go back to Spain for.

We had Mass in here.  You can see the statue of St. Ignatius on the right.

The following day, we were flying to Lisbon late in the day.  We had free time until then.  This was the only day that we didn’t have Mass as a group.  So I walked to Good Shepherd Cathedral for Mass.  They had several Masses and most of them were in Spanish.  I purposely went to the Mass in Basque.  Two years ago, I went to a Mass in Italian and I was able to figure out what one of the readings was.  If I had gone to Mass in Spanish, I would have been able to understand some things.  But Basque is not close to Spanish at all.  It has no relation to any other known languages.  It uses the letter K a lot, which isn’t used in Spanish and it uses the combination of tx a lot (which makes a ch sound in Basque).  I wanted to see what it was like going to Mass in a language that I wouldn’t understand at all.  Of course, I knew what was happening, but I didn’t understand what was being said other than names like Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, and Leo, which were similar to Spanish.  One thing that I did not see a lot of was the Spanish flag.  I think the only place I saw it was at the city hall building.  San Sebastián is in Basque Country, which is a mostly autonomous region of Spain.  So I saw the Basque flag a lot, but not the Spanish flag.  Later we were off to Portugal for our final country of the trip.  We got in late and had dinner at the hotel and that was it for the day.

There were definitely some good views walking around San Sebastián.

On our first full day in Portugal, we went to Fatima (also featured on Unsolved Mysteries).  We saw the houses where Lucia Santos and her cousins, Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto lived.  We stopped for lunch at a place that had a cafeteria upstairs and then everything you could ever want to buy from Fatima downstairs.  I had duck rice (recommended by our Portuguese tour guide, it was good) and a Super Bock (we saw ads for Super Bock everywhere, it seemed like the mass produced Portuguese beer).  Then we went to the Sanctuary of Fatima.  It is where Mary appeared to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in 1917.  The Chapel of the Apparitions is built where five of the six apparitions happened (they happened on the 13th of the month, another one happened in a different location on a different day because the kids had been kidnapped by the government).  One nice thing about Fatima was that it was not nearly as crowded as the Vatican or Lourdes.  Lourdes was crowded, but manageable, the Vatican was just crowded (and I was there in August, when the crowds aren’t supposed to be too big so they’re probably worse at other times of the year).

The Chapel of the Apparitions is nice enough, but it’s not the Grotto.

There’s a lot of history connected with the apparitions.  They happened during World War I.  Mary predicted the end of World War I, but warned of a worse war that would follow.  She requested the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to prevent Russia from spreading its errors.  Of course, World War II came and Russia was not consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the time (I’ll come back to that in a minute).  Russia became communist and spread atheistic communism wherever they could.  There was a vision of a pope being killed.  This turned out to be the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981 (the anniversary of the first apparition).  John Paul II credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life (apparently he saw somebody holding the statue and turned to look at it right before he was shot, which prevented the shot from being fatal).  As for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, there is debate about whether or not it has happened.  John Paul II consecrated the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1984.  Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 2022.  So both of those include Russia, but the first one didn’t name Russia specifically and the second one didn’t set Russia apart on its own.

There are two basilicas in the Sanctuary of Fatima.  On one side is the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary.  We had Mass in a chapel inside the basilica.  

This basilica was built from 1928-1953.  Lucia Santos and Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto are buried inside.

And then on the other side is the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity.

This basilica was built from 2004-2007.  It is the sixth largest Catholic church in the word.  Besides being very ugly, it has no tabernacle.  They had a beautiful basilica in Fatima and they were adding another one.  How did they come up with this?

The inside of the basilica isn’t terrible (besides the lack of a tabernacle).

My favorite part of the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity was that it had a statue of St. John Paul II outside.  There was also a statue of St. Paul VI because those two popes visited Fatima.

Our last full day in Europe was in Lisbon.  We had Mass in the church built above where St. Anthony was born.  Apparently the Portuguese don’t like it when people refer to him as St. Anthony of Padua because he was born in Lisbon and spent most of his life in Portugal.  We went out to a fancy dinner and I finished my night by stopping at Cerveja Canil, a craft brewery across the street from my hotel.

This is where St. Anthony of Lisbon/Padua was born.  My parish growing up was St. Anthony of Padua and I have a several friends who went to and/or taught at St. Anthony’s High School.  I have some very good former students who went to St. Anthony’s as well.

This would have been my final picture in Europe, but then we went to another nice church on our last morning in Portugal.  These two beers were both about half the size of a normal beer.

I have some random thoughts about things Europe does better than the United States.  Europe does prices for goods better than the United States.  If something costs €8.50, you’re going to pay €8.50.  In the United States, if something costs $8.50, you might pay like $9.24 or something like that.  If Europeans can figure out how to include taxes in prices, why can’t we?  Another thing we should take from Europe is different options on beer sizes.  When I went to the craft brewery, I tried two beers that were 20 centiliters each (40 centiliters is a little bit less than a pint).  At lunch one day, I got a small beer (it was cheaper than a bottle of water).  Baseball stadiums should definitely do this with draft beers.  At Dodger Stadium, if you get a craft beer on tap, it’s probably a pint and a half (or maybe even more than that) and you’re going to pay like $18 (or possibly more).  Give me the option to get a pint for $14 or something.  I go to a lot of baseball games.  With no size options and just a big beer at an absurd price, I might just not get a beer.  But if I had a smaller option and a lower (but still absurd price), I’d be more likely to get the smaller option.  And finally, European churches are usually much more beautiful than American churches.  Of course, the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity is an exception here.

As a patriotic American, I have to point out things that we do better than Europe.  Europeans don’t know how to count.  According to my hotel in Spain, my room was on the fourth floor.  In reality, I was on the sixth floor (but most Europeans probably would have thought I was on the fifth floor, which would still be wrong).  Europeans do time wrong.  They said my flight home from Portugal was at 17:05.  We’re not in the military, it was 5:05.  I really don’t get why they do this.  I don’t think people in Europe actually talk like that.  They would say it was 5:05 also.  Speaking of flights, European airports are stupid.  When we were in the airports in Lisbon and Bilbao, they would wait way too long to tell you what gate your flight was leaving from.  And then when you knew what the gate was, there weren’t nearly enough seats by the gate.  There are plenty of bad American airports, but I would take the American airport experience over the European airport experience.  As for beverages, I like the option to get small beers, but I definitely missed ice water.  What is it about Europeans that they don’t like making things colder when colder is better?  Fortunately all of my hotels had air conditioning, but I was definitely missing ice in my water.  Although my hotels had air conditioning, the churches did not.  It wasn’t too hot for most of the trip so that wasn’t a big deal.  But the other problem with the churches is the kneelers.  The churches may be beautiful (not the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity), but the kneelers were almost always just an uncomfortable slab of wood.  And of course, Europe uses the metric system, which is very stupid.  And it’s annoying when my phone knows I’m in Europe and I google Lourdes weather and the temperatures come up in Celsius (if I google Lourdes weather when I’m in the US, it will give me temperatures in Fahrenheit).

So that was my trip to Europe.  I had a busy July with trips to four different time zones.  I don’t have much planned for August.  I might have one more trip, but it would be a short one that won’t involve flying.  I might not have a flight again until 2027.  When I get to 2027, I’ll try to get to at least one of the states where I haven’t seen a sporting event yet (West Virginia, Mississippi, and Hawaii).  I don’t know what my next international trip will be.  There’s a good chance that it will be Canada.  I’ve thought about combining Vancouver with one of my trips out west because it’s the only Canadian city with an affiliated minor league team.  Toronto is always a possibility because it’s an easy trip and they have renovated the Rogers Center since I was there 12 years ago.  Besides Canada, Poland is pretty much the last country that I haven’t been to yet that I really want to go to (because of John Paul the Great).  After visiting Italy and the Vatican two years ago, they became the countries that I’d most want to revisit.  And my desire to revisit them only increased last year with the election of the first American pope.  So hopefully I’ll get back to those countries at some point.  And after visiting Lourdes and Fatima, I kind of want to go to Mexico because of Our Lady of Guadalupe.  So I definitely hope another international trip will happen at some point in the not too distant future, but I have no idea when that will be.  I definitely wouldn't be opposed to something like this trip again where I’m with a bunch of people who speak English and I don’t have to plan anything.  It was a nice, easy way to get to three countries.

A Stupid Loss for a Great Team

For the third straight year, I was in Los Angeles in early July to see the Dodgers with Sean, Pete, and Lorenzo.  Two years ago was a low point in their season.  Last year, I went to the game the night before Clayton Kershaw’s 3,000th strikeout.  This year I was there to see some interesting Dodger history.

We all knew Shohei Ohtani was one home run away from 300.  What I did not know until after the fact was that this was the Dodgers’ 11,110th game as the Los Angeles Dodgers (between the regular season and the postseason).  That is noteworthy because the Brooklyn Dodgers played 11,109 games between the regular season and the postseason.  The seasons are longer now and there are more postseason games so they still haven’t spent as much time in Los Angeles as they did in Brooklyn, but they have now played more games as the Los Angeles Dodgers than they did as the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Before the game, Sean and I stopped at Philippe’s for French dip sandwiches.  Philippe’s is pretty close to the stadium so it is always a good option before a Dodger game.  They should have Philippe’s inside the stadium.  There are a decent number of food options, but they could use something local like this in the stadium.  But I’m not too concerned about the food inside the stadium because if I’m only going to get there for one game a year, I’m getting Dodger Dogs and not worrying about the other options.

As for the game, it was Justin Wrobleski for the Dodgers against Michael Lorenzen for the Rockies.  I had just seen the Rockies get pounded a week earlier.  I hoped to see that again, but it was not to be.  Justin Wrobleski probably doesn’t get enough credit for his performance in the World Series last year.  He pitched five scoreless innings in four games (including four scoreless innings in the Dodgers’ last three wins).  He did that after not pitching at all in the playoffs before that.  This year, he’s been excellent as a starter.  He’s 7th in the NL in ERA, tied for 4th in wins, and tied for 3rd in WHIP.  He was not originally selected as an all star (he would have been if not for the fact that every team gets an all star and the Dodgers already had five).  I figured he would get added as a replacement and that’s what happened.  As for this game, he was really good.  He allowed one run on six hits and two walks with nine strikeouts in seven innings.  He left in position to win.  Unfortunately he didn’t get the win.

Shohei Ohtani got rid of any possible suspense by hitting his 300th career home run leading off the bottom of the first.  He’s going to break Mookie Betts’s record for most career leadoff home runs (Betts has 32, but Ohtani is now at 27).  Only two Dodgers have ever hit 300 home runs with the Dodgers (Duke Snider and Gil Hodges), but Ohtani was the eighth player to hit his 300th career home run with the Dodgers (Snider, Hodges, Gary Sheffield, Adrian Gonzalez, Freddie Freeman, JD Martinez, Mookie Betts, and Ohtani).

Shohei Ohtani is about to hit his 300th home run.

The Dodgers made it 2-0 on a bases loaded walk by Andy Pages in the fifth, but they missed an opportunity to add more that inning.  The Rockies scored on a groundout in the sixth, but the Dodgers answered with an RBI single by Alex Freeland in the bottom of the sixth to make it 3-1.  The Dodgers brought in World Series hero Will Klein in the eighth inning.  He was the most random World Series hero for the Dodgers last year after pitching 15 ⅓ regular season innings and just one inning in the postseason (a very low leverage inning when the Dodgers lost Game 1 by a score of 11-4) before pitching four scoreless innings in Game 3 (he was the only Dodger other than Yamamoto to get a win in the series).  He’s been very good for the Dodgers in a bigger role this year, but he was not good on this night.  He only got one out and three runs on one hit and one walk (all of the runs were unearned because of an error, but Klein wasn’t good).  The first run scored on Miguel Rojas’s error fielding a possible double play ball that could have ended the inning.  The worst case scenario should have been runners on the corners with two outs.  Instead it was runners on the corners with one out and a run scoring.  Although Klein wasn’t good, he could have gotten out of it without any runs scoring if the Dodgers had gotten the double play there.  But they didn’t and the Dodgers brought in Jack Dreyer.  Jake McCarthy put down a bunt to Max Muncy and Muncy threw to Alex Freeland covering first base on the bunt for the second out.  The tying run scored on the bunt and with Muncy fielding the bunt, nobody was covering third so the runner from first just kept going.  Alex Freeland made a poor decision to throw it and try to hit Miguel Rojas on the run covering third.  Even if Rojas caught it, they probably weren’t getting the out.  But Rojas didn’t catch it, the ball went into the dugout and the run scored.  So the tying run scored from third and the go ahead run scored from first on a bunt.  Miguel Rojas had the biggest hit of the World Series with his game-tying home run in the top of the ninth inning in Game 7.  But this wasn’t a good inning for him.  It was a really stupid inning.  But Will Klein and Miguel Rojas are definitely allowed to have a bad game after what they did for the Dodgers in the World Series last year.

The Dodgers were only down by a run against a bad team so I was hoping they would come back.  They didn’t do anything in the eighth.  In the ninth inning, they had 8, 9, and 1 coming up.  I figured we would get pinch hitters since Mookie Betts and Teoscar Hernandez weren’t playing.  Dave Roberts let Alex Freeland hit and that worked as he got a single.  Then Roberts went to Teoscar Hernandez to pinch hit for Miguel Rojas and Hernandez walked.  So it was looking pretty good for the Dodgers with the tying run on second and the go ahead run on first with nobody out and the top of the order coming up.  But Shohei Ohtani popped up on the infield and Andy Pages hit a fly ball to right.  That brought up Freddie Freeman.  The first pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  The second pitch was called a ball.  The Rockies challenged and the call was overturned.  Freeman ended up striking out on the sixth pitch of the at bat to end the game.  The game didn’t end on a challenge, but it made me think of how lame it would be if a playoff game ended on a challenge or if you thought a playoff game ended and then it didn’t because of a challenge.  I have my issues with the ABS strike zone and I would just get rid of it, but that’s not going to happen so I would be fine if they just used it instead of having challenges.  Or if they just used it for the ninth inning and extra innings and got rid of challenges after eight innings, that would be better also.

This was my 17th game at Dodger Stadium.  The first games I went to there were before the blog in 2011.  The Dodgers are 9-8 in the games I’ve been to at Dodger Stadium.  So that’s a .529 winning percentage.  Apparently their overall winning percentage at Dodger Stadium since the start of 2011 is .635.  So they’ve been bad by their standards with me in attendance.  But it’s a small sample size and also it’s correlation not causation so I’m definitely not going to conclude that I shouldn’t go to games at Dodger Stadium.  The only stadiums where I’ve seen more baseball games are Shea Stadium (my estimate is that I attended around 50 games at Shea Stadium) and Citi Field (I’ve been to 34 games at Citi Field), and maybe the old Yankee Stadium (I’ve been to eight baseball games and four football games at the new stadium and my estimate is that I went to like 13-20 games at the old stadium).  I wish I could get to more games at Dodger Stadium.  I used to try to get to two games when I would visit, but ticket prices are so crazy now.  I had a couple of Dodger Dogs that were very good, but the lack of real mustard was disappointing.  To drink I had a 310 Blonde from Santa Monica Brew Works (which Pete and I visited many years ago).  Dodger has a couple of areas with a decent craft beer selection.  A lot of it is from California, but more like San Diego or northern California.  I wanted a more local beer (I can’t be drinking beer from Padres or Giants territory at Dodger Stadium) and the 310 Blonde was very good.

It was a disappointing result, but the Dodgers have won the last two World Series, so whatever.  I always like being at Dodger Stadium and it was good seeing Pete and Lorenzo there again.  It was 76°, attendance was 47,806 (probably the biggest crowd for a baseball game that I’ll get to this year), and the game took two hours and 30 minutes.  Major League Baseball just released their 2027 schedule.  Hopefully I’ll get back to Dodger Stadium to see a win next year, but that schedule is very much tentative at this point with a lockout possibly coming.  Hopefully Major League Baseball won’t be stupid enough to have a work stoppage, but Rob Manfred is the commissioner so I’m definitely worried.  If he has his way, Major League Baseball might come up with a collective bargaining agreement as stupid as the NBA’s.  I wonder what the position of the Dodgers’ ownership group is.  If I was them, I’d pretty much be on the players’ side.  So we’ll see what happens.  I hope we get a full 162 game season next year.  There’s a chance that this was my last baseball game of the year as I don’t have any solid plans to go to anymore games.  But there’s still a lot of summer left so I hope I’ll get to at least a couple more games before school starts.

A World Series Hero in the Wrong Uniform

Just a few days after getting home from Colorado and Wyoming, I headed out west again.  This time I was going to California for three baseball games.  I wanted to combine my nearly annual trip to Los Angeles with something else.  We were going to the Dodger game on Tuesday and a minor league game on Wednesday.  So that meant doing something on Monday or Thursday.  I looked at the minor league schedule for Thursday and the only games out west that would be easy to get to were places I had already been to (Reno and Las Vegas) and Sacramento (which I’m hoping to get to next year for an A’s game).  So that meant going to a game on Monday, but there are usually no minor league games on Mondays so I went to a Padres game.  It was my third Padres game.  I saw Dodgers-Padres in 2012 and Pirates-Padres in 2017.

This was Diamondbacks-Padres.  I had mixed feelings about the game.  Both teams are division rivals.  Both teams were tied for second at 14 games behind the Dodgers.  So there was no obvious rooting interest for the benefit of the Dodgers.  The Padres have been probably the Dodgers’ biggest rival this decade (the Dodgers beat them in the playoffs in 2020 and 2024 and lost to them in the playoffs in 2022).  But the Padres’ starter was Dodgers World Series hero Walker Buehler.  I hate that Buehler is on the Padres, but I can still root for him as long as he isn’t playing the Dodgers.  On the other hand, the Padres’ first three hitters were my three least favorite active players other than the cheating 2017 Astros who are still around:  Fernando Tatis (cheater), Jake Cronenworth (Michigan), and Manny Machado (Manny Machado).  So I guess I was rooting for the Padres to win this game 1-0 with anybody other than those guys scoring or driving in the run.  Unfortunately, Walker Buehler was not good.  It’s a shame he didn’t come around when pitchers weren’t throwing too hard because maybe he could have stayed healthy and had a great career.  Since having his second Tommy John surgery, he is 16-18 in the regular season with a 5.18 ERA and a 1.50 WHIP.  Before his second Tommy John surgery, he was 46-16 in the regular season with a 3.02 ERA and a 1.04 WHIP.  He’s had a nice career with some great postseason moments, but if he had come around a couple of generations earlier, he might have had an Orel Hershiser-type career.

The bad news was that Buehler was bad, but the good news was that the Padres didn’t hit.  The Diamondbacks took a 2-0 lead in the first with runs scoring on a throwing error by Buehler and an RBI single by Max Kepler.  Buehler ended up giving up seven runs in five innings, with Max Kepler and Geraldo Perdomo hitting home runs off of him.  Nolan Arenado added another home run later to make it 8-0.  And that was the final score.

It's not as good as PNC Park, a great view at Petco Park.

Petco Park is really good.  It’s one of the best in the Majors (I have it ranked fifth among stadiums that still exist, but the second best to be built after Dodger Stadium in 1962).  It opened in 2004, but I noticed during this trip that it has a little bit of a Fenway Park thing going on with ramps in random places a slight changes in elevation walking around the lower level.  I visited the Padres Hall of Fame, which I think has been added since my last time there nine years ago.  Since it's the Padres, it wasn't very big.  The craft beer selection looked really good.  I didn’t have one because I was definitely going to have a beer the next night at the Dodger game.  I did get the short rib quesabirria tacos.  They were fantastic.  Being in San Diego, I was hoping for fish tacos, but I didn’t see any.  I’ll take a hot dog at a baseball game any day and be perfectly happy, but these might have been the best specialty food I’ve had at a baseball game.

They gave me a fork, but the structural integrity of these tacos was very good.

So to summarize, the good news was that the Padres lost and the stadium and the tacos were great and the bad news was that Walker Buehler wasn’t good.  Oh well, he’ll always be fondly remembered by Dodger fans (he's on the All-Jim Team).  It was 72°, attendance was 38,204, and the game was two hours and 25 minutes.

The next day I was off to Los Angeles.  I’ll get to the game later, but I took the train from San Diego.  I had done the opposite train ride in 2017.  Going from San Diego to Los Angeles, most of the first half of the ride is right along the coast so that was cool.  The stop at Anaheim is right by Angel Stadium.  So I saw three Major League Baseball stadiums on this trip, but only attended games in two.

I took this picture from the train.

Shohei Ohtani used to work here.

Mile High Baseball

I don’t remember when I came up with the goal of getting to a sporting event in all 50 states.  Whenever I did, I had probably already been to a sporting event in 30+ states.  But actually doing all 50 seemed like a long shot.  The state that seemed most unlikely was Wyoming.  Well, I crossed Wyoming off the list and I only have three left.  It was the second leg of my first trip of the summer.

I flew out to Denver and went to Marlins-Rockies.  Those two teams didn’t exist until I was nine years old.  It was my third time at Coors Field.  The first was in 2012 for Dodgers-Rockies.  The second time was when I flew out to Denver and met Tom to help him move across the country in 2017.  We didn’t get to a game, but we did the stadium tour.  So I was back for a second game.  It was really just because I wanted to combine Wyoming with something and Denver was pretty much the only logical choice.

I got to Denver and I didn’t have anything planned other than the game so I took a nap when I got to my hotel room before the game.  The forecast was good for the game, but when I left my hotel to walk to the stadium, the sky looked ominous.  There were some rain drops and I saw a few lightning strikes in the distance.  But the forecast still looked good for the game.  I got to Coors Field and took a lap around the stadium and then headed up to my seat.  Right before the game started, it started raining pretty good.  So I headed up to the purple row, which is 5,280 feet above sea level.  It was about five rows from the top, but it was high up enough to be under cover.  So I watched the beginning of the game from up there.  The rain didn’t last long and then I went down to the field level to get food and a beer.  I got the taco trio (three different tacos) and a 90 Shilling Amber Ale from the Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado.  The tacos were pretty good and the beer was underwhelming.  I got it because it was one of the few craft beers I saw at the stadium.  There was a lot of crafty beer (Coors Field is where Blue Moon was created, but that’s owned by Molson Coors), but not a lot of actual craft beer.  I watched a little bit of the game from the field level down the first base line and then I headed back up to my actual seat.

This was the view from 5,280 feet above sea level.

As for the game, I didn’t really care too much who won.  In theory, the Rockies are a division rival for the Dodgers, but they’re terrible so I didn’t care if they won.  They also had Eric Karros’s son playing third base so I guess I was rooting for them.  It was Tanner Gordon pitching for the Rockies against Eury Perez.  The game was not very competitive.  The Marlins took a 1-0 lead in the first, but the Rockies tied it in the bottom of the first on a Mickey Moniak home run.  But the Marlins retook the lead in the second and then went up 5-1 on a three-run home run by Javier Sanoja in the third.  The lead got to 10-1 on a Joe Mack two-run home run in the seventh.  The Rockies scored a run in the bottom of the seventh to make it 10-2.  With a non-competitive game that I didn’t really care about, I left after seven innings.  The Marlins ended up winning 14-3.  It was 83° and attendance was 20.526.  I assume that will be the smallest crowd for a Major League game that I get to this year.  The game lasted three hours.

The next day, I was off to Casper, Wyoming.  But before that, I picked up breakfast at Sam’s No. 3 in Denver.  It was on Man v. Food.  I had a breakfast burrito that was pretty good.  Then I flew to Casper.  As far as I could tell, Denver was the only city that had flights to Casper.  The post-security area at the Casper airport was like one big room.  There were vending machines and no other food (there was a restaurant on the other side of security).  Casper is the second biggest city in Wyoming with a population of about 59,000 in the 2020 census (Cheynne had about 65,000).  The elevation is about the same as Denver.  In 2012, I drove from Denver to Cheyenne for breakfast because I figured I would never be in Wyoming again.  As it turns out, this was my third time in Wyoming.  Tom and I drove through Wyoming going from Denver to Salt Lake City on the first day I was with him when I was helping him move.  But of course, I hadn’t been to a sporting event in Wyoming.  Casper had a minor league team from 2001 or 2002 (Wikipedia has conflicting information) to 2011.  It was a rookie league team (rookie league doesn’t exist anymore) and the team eventually moved to Grand Junction, Colorado.  They played at Mike Lansing Field (named after a former Major Leaguer who was identified in the Mitchell Report as a cheater).  Now Mike Lansing Field is home to the Casper Spuds (the minor league team was the Casper Ghosts, which was a better name).  The Spuds are a collegiate summer league team.  I’ve done collegiate summer league baseball to cross off Alaska, Oregon, and Vermont on the list of states to see a sporting event in and so I was doing that with Wyoming.

I went to two games because I didn’t want to take the chance of traveling all the way to Wyoming and having a game rained out.  It was the Casper Spuds against the Oahe Zap (from Pierre, South Dakota).  I’m pretty sure the Zap won both games.  I left after seven innings both times.  I tried to look it up, but the websites for the two teams and the league are not good.  There was no information about the players (I would have checked to see where they play college baseball).  The Zap’s website has their scores from last season, but not this season.  The Spuds’ website doesn’t have anything.  But the Zap were leading when I left in both games and when I went to the second game, I heard some people talking about how the Spuds made a comeback the night before but came up short.  The food and beer selection was fine for a collegiate summer league team.  I had a bratwurst at the first game and nothing to drink.  For the second game, they had a food truck making quesadillas, but they were kind of expensive and also it was July 2 (our actual Independence Day) so I wanted to have a hot dog.  That worked out well because Thursdays are energy night.  I had no idea what that meant, but apparently it was $2 off hot dogs and beer.  So I got a hot dog for $3 and a Spuds Suds from the Black Tooth Brewing Company (a craft brewery in Wyoming).  Unfortunately they only had yellow and not real mustard, but the hot dog was good.  The beer was nothing special, but it was very cold.  The temperature was in the 80s for the games (on days when the highs back home were right around 100°).  I have no idea what the attendance was.  Wikipedia says that the stadium has a capacity of 2,500.  I’m pretty sure there were less than 1,000 people at the games I went to.  The stadium reminded me of the stadium in Boise, Idaho (another spot that no longer has a minor league team).  There were three sections of seats (one behind home plate, and one on each side of the field).  I sat behind home plate up near the press box for both games mainly to stay out of the sun before it set.  I think all the tickets were $10.  The scoreboard looked super old.  It must be the scoreboard from when the stadium originally opened.  If this was still a minor league stadium, it would be pretty terrible, but it's fine for collegiate summer league baseball.  So I got to cross Wyoming off the list of states to see a sporting event in and I celebrated the 250 years of American independence with baseball, a hot dog, and craft beer.  That was pretty good.

I think Wyoming was the most unlikely state for me to watch a baseball game, but I did it on my third trip to Wyoming (which is at least two more times than I ever thought I would be in Wyoming).

The only states I still have to see a sporting event in are West Virginia, Mississippi. and Hawaii.  I don’t know which one will be next or when that will be.

Mendoza!

I am not going to be able to see the Dodgers when they come to Citi Field this summer.  But I wanted to make sure I got to a game at Citi Field and a baseball game seemed like a good way to start summer vacation.  The plan was to go to Cubs-Mets on June 22.  That was the first day I was going to be off because of summer vacation.  My last day of school was June 18, but I would have been off the next three days even if it wasn’t summer vacation because it would have been Juneteenth, Saturday, and Sunday.  So my dad and I were planning to go on Monday, June 22, but that game got rained out (I never bought tickets because the forecast looked pretty bad for a while).  The next two nights were the NBA Draft (which should be one night, not two) so we went on Thursday, June 25.  It ended up being Carlos Mendoza’s last game as the manager of the Mets.

This was our view for the game.

This was my 34th game at Citi Field in the 18 years that it has existed.  The only stadium I’ve been to more was Shea Stadium.  I don’t know the exact number of games I went to at Shea Stadium, but I went to games there over the course of 20 years and I would guess it was an average of about 2.5 games per year so I would guess I went to around 50 games there.  Of the 34 games I’ve been to at Citi Field, 22 have been against the Dodgers.  This time I was a neutral fan.  I would have been inclined to root for the Cubs because the Mets were wearing their stupid black uniforms, but there were other factors to consider.  The Cubs are managed by former Notre Dame baseball player Craig Counsell.  But Craig Counsell also complained about the Dodgers being able to count Shohei Ohtani as a position player.  He brought this up for no reason one time (it wasn’t when the Cubs were playing the Dodgers), but also his complaint is stupid.  If your roster is limited to 13 pitchers and you have a player that both pitches and hits, you should be able to count him as whatever you want to count him as on your roster.  The Cubs do have some former Dodgers.  They have Michael Conforto (perhaps the Dodger who contributed the least to last season’s championship), Justin Dean, and Michael Busch.  As much as I wanted to root for Justin Dean (he played in 13 playoff games in the playoffs last year with zero plate appearances, but the Dodgers went 12-1 in those games, including Games 2, 6, and 7 of the World Series), I couldn’t root for the Cubs.  Why?  Because although they have some guys I want to root for, they also have cheater Alex Bregman on their team.

Baseball is harder when you’re not cheating.

This was the final game of a four-game series against the Cubs.  The Mets had lost the first three.  It was Freddy Peralta for the Mets against Matthew Boyd for the Cubs.  Boyd pitched four and two-thirds scoreless and was taken out after 76 pitches because the way pitchers are used in 2026 is stupid.  Peralta pitched five scoreless and then came out with two outs in the sixth after giving up three unearned runs.  Michael Conforto drove in the first run on a single, cheater Alex Bregman drove in a run on a double, and then Ian Happ had an RBI single.  The Mets responded well, tying the game on home runs by Eric Wagaman and Jared Young in the sixth and seventh.  And then a perfectly good game was ruined by Rob Manfred extra innings.  Pete Crow-Armstrong drove in a runner who was on second base for no reason with an RBI double in the top of the tenth.  The Mets went down 1-2-3 in the bottom of the tenth and lost 4-3.  So the Mets allowed four runs and none of them were earned.  The first three were unearned because of a throwing error by shortstop Ronny Mauricio.  The last one was unearned because Rob Manfred put a runner on second base for no reason.  The night before, the Mets made six errors and gave up five unearned runs (and also five earned runs) and lost 10-5.  After the series against the Cubs Carlos Mendoza was fired.

Besides being subjected to Rob Manfred extra innings, it was good to be at a Major League Baseball game for the first time since I was in Minnesota ten months earlier.  Attendance was 36,035.  The game lasted three hours and 13 minutes and it was 76°.

I’ll finish with my thoughts on the World Cup.  I don’t have many thoughts because soccer is stupid.  I thought the thing I would enjoy most about the World Cup would be not watching it.  And indeed, I have enjoyed not watching it.  But the best thing about the World Cup has been seeing all these foreigners visiting the United States for the World Cup and realizing that the United States is pretty awesome.  I have many issues with soccer, but I’ll just mention two right now.  Why do soccer broadcasters use improper grammar?  They’ll say stuff like “Belgium have played well in the World Cup.”  Belgium is a singular noun.  If you said, “The Belgians have played well in the World Cup,” that would be grammatically correct because the subject of that sentence is a plural noun.  And why is the United States always referred to as USMNT?  I know it stands for United States Men’s National Team.  Why can’t we just call them USA Soccer?  Whenever I see USMNT, I just think United States Mutant Ninja Turtles.  So those are all my soccer thoughts for now.  I hope the United States wins to embarrass countries that care about soccer, but I’m not going to be watching because as a patriotic American, I definitely don’t care about soccer.